Me and Shakespeare ─ Adventures With the Bard

On the eve of retiring from a successful publishing career, Herman Gollob attends a wonderful Broadway production of Hamlet starring Ralph Fiennes. Galvanized by the splendor of the language, the drama and the acting, he discovers an insatiable passion for all things Shakespeare. He reads broadly and deeply about the plays, discusses them with some of the great actors, directors, and teachers of our time, and soon finds himself teaching a popular Shakespeare class at a small New Jersey college.

Gollob’s quest leads him to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon; to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; to a summer course on Shakespeare at Oxford; and to London’s recently rebuilt Globe Theatre. As he pursues his glorious new obsession, Gollob reflects on his family’s bittersweet history, his encounters with writers, and the emergence of a Jewish identity that inspires some original ideas about Shakespeare’s plays.Me and Shakespeare is a joyful memoir that attests to the power of literature to re-invigorate our lives at any age.

Herman Gollob is a graduate of Texas A&M University. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Korea, he worked as a theatrical agent for the MCA Artists Agency and a literary agent for the William Morris Agency before finding his calling as an editor with Little, Brown. He has been editor in chief of Atheneum, Harper’s Magazine Press, the Literary Guild, and Doubleday, and a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Barbara, and teaches Shakespeare at the Lifelong Learning Institute of Caldwell College.