A middle-aged professor sits in a crumbling house in the Berkshires, furiously composing letters he will never send to the living and the dead, to Heidegger and Eisenhower, to his ex-wife and his psychiatrist, to God. Moses Herzog is a man whose intellect has become a kind of fever, whose learning cannot protect him from the ordinary catastrophes of adultery, divorce, and humiliation. Bellow published this novel in 1964, and in it he performed something close to impossible: he made the life of the mind comic, desperate, and viscerally alive. The prose moves at the speed of thought itself, veering between philosophy and slapstick. In Herzog's torrent of unsent letters, thinking becomes a form of prayer.