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  • Published: 7 March 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141184876
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $22.99

Herzog




"A masterpiece ... Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization" New York Times

Herzog is alone, now that his wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend. Solitary, in a crumbling house which he shares with rats, he is buffeted by a whirlwind of mental activity. People are rumouring that his mind had collapsed. But is it true? Locked for days in the custody of his rambling memories, Herzog scrawls frantic letters which he never mails. His mind buzzes with conundrums and polemics, writing in a spectacular intellectual labyrinth.

Is he crazy, or is he a genius?

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.

  • Published: 7 March 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141184876
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born in Canada but brought to Chicago at the age of nine and educated there. He attended the Universities of Chicago, Northwestern and Wisconsin as well as fitting in a wartime stint in the Merchant Marine.
His first novel - Dangling Man - was published when he was in his twenties. Later novels, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December and Him With His Foot In His Mouth And Other Stories have brought him innumerable literary grants, awards, prizes, scholarships, fellowships and honours not only in his own country but internationally as well. He is probably the only man to have received an Honorary Degree from both Harvard and Yale in the same year. He has also written plays, short stories, articles for learned journals, been a war correspondent in Israel and held positions in a number of universities in the United States and elsewhere. He speaks four or five languages and has travelled extensively.
In 1976 Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1984 President Mitterand made him a commander of the Legion of Honour.

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Praise for Herzog

Spectacular ... surely Bellow's greatest novel

Malcolm Bradbury

A writer of genius

Sunday Times

The character of Herzog is Bellow's grandest creation, and his mind is as rich as the mind of any character in American literature

Philip Roth

Nobody else has ever sat down and wallowed to this extent in his own life, with full art

John Berryman
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