Hermann Broch, born on November 1, 1886, in Vienna, Austria, and died on May 30, 1951, in New Haven, Connecticut, was an Austrian writer, one of the greatest modernist writers of all time. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hermann Broch is a novelist of the stature of Joyce and Proust. The Death of Virgil is considered by many as his masterpiece. The novel recreates the last day of the poet Virgil's life, hours during which he considers destroyi...

With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic), a disgruntled bookke...

By any measure, Hermann Broch was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Author of The Sleepwalkers and The Spell, he stands, together with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, at the pinnacle of literary Modernism. Born in 1886, he saw the First World War destroy the culture and consciousness of what had come before, seeing the West thrust unwillingly into the modern age. By 1938 Broch found himself arrested and detained, during which time be began work on his g...

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was impr...