Bellow's Herzog Reading Order

Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964) is one of the most celebrated American novels of the mid-twentieth century — a dense, furious, and deeply funny account of Moses Herzog, a twice-divorced academic who, in the aftermath of his second marriage's destruction, composes a series of unsent letters to the living and the dead: philosophers, politicians, historical figures, and personal enemies. The letters — addressed to Nietzsche, Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, his ex-wife Madeleine, her lover Valentine Gersbach — allow Bellow to dramatize the collapse of Western intellectual certainty through one man's mental breakdown while producing some of the sharpest comedy and most penetrating cultural criticism in American fiction. Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976, was the dominant figure in American literature for three decades, and Herzog — which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was the defining serious novel of the early 1960s — represents his most personal achievement. The novel is a fierce portrait of the New York Jewish intellectual and a sustained argument about whether the tradition of Western humanist thought can survive the twentieth century's catastrophes.