By the following November, Bellow was busily at work on Herzog and immersed in marital and financial troubles. They find their fullest expression in a book about a victimized divorcee and failed academic whose magnum opus on romanticism will never be finished, far less published. While Henderson the Rain King begins to focus Bellow's intellectual quarrel with the modern social sciences, Herzog (1964) extends the critique to the entire modern philosophical tradition. Precipitated into thoughtfulness by the failure of his most recent marriage, Herzog explains that he has been "overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends." He is appalled at what he calls the Protestant-Freudian assessment of himself provided by his analyst. Edvig has labeled his love for Madelaine "hysterical dependency" and his personality type as narcissistic, masochistic, and anachronistic. In self-defense Herzog bursts out in a tirade against the "creeping psychoanalysis of everyday life." From there he goes on to condemn thinkers like Shapiro and Banowitch who accept psychoanalytical premises and all political power struggles as paranoid personality theory. Their "curious creepy minds," he complains, always work on the premise that "madness always rules the world" and that mankind "resembles a lot of cannibals running around in packs, gibbering, bewailing its own murders, pressing out the living world as dead excrement." He complains that Hobbes and Freud have not been our best benefactors and calls for a moratorium of further academic definitions of humanity which reveal "A lousy, cringing, grudging conception of human nature." Thinkers like Dewey, Nietzsche, and Whitehead he accuses of concluding that we cannot find happiness within ourselves because we distrust our own natures and take recourse in religion or philosophy. Nietzsche is indicted for unleashing the Dionysiac spirit and calling modern cultural history a fall from classical greatness. Nietzsche's ideas are no freer from perversion, nor closer to enlightenment than those with whom he quarrels Herzog concludes. He blames Heidegger for the idea that we have all fallen into the "quotidian" and asks scathingly, "When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" Spengler's historicism infuriates the middle-aged Jew who remembers reading in his youth in The Decline of the West the anti-Semitic idea that all Jews were an archaic race of Magians for whom all heroic and romantic traditions had failed. Modern physics, with its theory of entropy also comes under attack, as do genetics, demography, sociology, statistics, and all other disciplines which have contributed to the destructive idea of biological or genetic predestination of the Self through the logical application Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. Herzog goes from there to an examination of Jean Wahl's theory of de-transcendence, and a condemnation of Rousseau: 

We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time. 

He concludes that "the light of truth is never far away, and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to come into it." Herzog is a massive accomplishment that has repeatedly been likened to Joyce's Ulysses. It remains Bellow's "biggest" book and was on the New York Times best-seller list for the entire year. At its heart is Bellow's profound shock at discovering, a year after his separation from Sondra, (Alexandra Tschacbasov, his second wife) her affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig. The last of their circle to know he had been deceived, Bellow lapsed into deep depression and produced an intensely self-justifying hero who was tearful, cuckolded, and utterly humiliated. Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual is essentially precipitated into intellectual and spiritual crisis by the failure of his marriage. The plot of the novel, as far as external action is concerned. is slender. Herzog leaves his home and marriage, fails in the classroom, abandons his academic project, and undertakes a massive spiritual and intellectual housekeeping via the production of dozens of letters to God, the long dead, the recent, dead, and the living. At the end of it he seems to have regained his sense of Jewish identity, purged himself of violent anger, abandoned his latest mistresses, and his repented of his dandeism. He has had a profound education in the realities of human nature, and rediscovered the value of nature and solitude on his Ludeyville estate. No longer the Graf Potocki of the Berkshires, both he and the estate seem to be reverting to some less pretentious earlier natural condition. After being in constant motion physically and mentally for the most part of the novel, he is finally seen at rest in a hammock, comtemplating the night sky. 

He wrote the novel in Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago. Bellow had married Susan Glassman, his third wife, in 1961, and this marriage took only three years to collapse. He divorced her in 1968. The legal recriminations, which followed for fifteen years, occupy his next three novels. In 1968 B'Nai Brith awarded him the Jewish Heritage Award and the French Government conferred on him its Crois de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. 

It was also during this period of the 1960s that Bellow lost his friend Delmore Schwartz, and began his most serious deliberations about an American culture which so readily destroys its artists and intellectuals. His essays denouncing intellectual skepticism and American materialism written during this period produced criticism from his listening audiences who perceived him to be dour, pedantic, old-fashioned, or wearily middle-aged. In October of 1968 at San Francisco State College he began to address an audience of students who groaned, catcalled, shouted, and whistled because they considered him a voice from another era. When he walked off the stage and left the building no-one stopped him. His marriage, to Susan Glassman, was over, and it was time to write. He retired to rented rooms in Chicago, while Susan went to New York. 

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