Herzog

Saul Bellow

Mrt. 2013 · Odyssey Editions

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Moses E. Herzog, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s Herzog finds himself in a pickle. He may be handsome, witty and wise, but his wife has just taken off with his best friend, and he is without resources to face his troubles. What is an academic to do when his personal life turns to chaos? Well this one writes letters—to enemies and friends, the living and the dead, politicians and philosophers—and even to God, though this last, along with the others, remains undelivered. An eccentric and vivid crowd of family and friends, keen to intervene as “reality instructors”, make things a lot worse for Herzog. And there’s no help in the books he has spent a lifetime studying. As Herzog’s comic predicament unfolds, we enter a mind as dazzling and brilliant as it is turbulent and confused, and we come away from the encounter surprisingly moved and satisfied.

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A fiction writer, essayist, playwright, lecturer, and memoirist, Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937 and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin before serving in the Marines during World War II. Later, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. Throughout his long and productive career, he contributed fiction to several magazines and quarterlies, including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Playboy, and Esquire, as well as criticism to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Leader, and others. Universally recognized as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, Bellow has won more honors than almost any other American writer. Among these, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt's Gift and the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish literature.” He was the first American to win the International Literary Prize, and remains the only novelist in history to have received three National Book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Saul Bellow died in 2005 at age 89.