Herzog

By Saul Bellow

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Moses Herzog, the hero of Saul Bellow's 1964 novel, is a scholar whose second wife, Madeleine, has left him for his best friend. In his crisis, Herzog writes letters, never sent, to friends, enemies, the famous and the dead, about his life, ideas and failures, as he travels between New York, Massachusetts and Chicago, trying to put his life back together. It brought Bellow his second National Book Award.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”