Volume 20 of WFH’s Complete Works published
September 2020 De Bezige Bij published Volume 20 of the Complete Works of Willem Frederik Hermans. It is the first of four volumes of work by Hermans that’s never been published in a book before.
The contributions collected in this volume originally appeared between February 1934 (the autobiographical “Midwinterblowing”) and April 1952 (an addition to a piece by Harry Mulisch about the lawsuit in response to I am always right). A small part of these texts are stories, poems, essays and miscellaneous that Hermans published in the school newspaper Suum Cuique as a pupil of the Barlaeus gymnasium. The largest part consists of essays, reviews and other contemplative texts that Hermans published in magazines such as De Baanbreker, Criterium, Litterair Paspoort, Vrij Nederland and Podium in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. He would never rebundle these texts, but with them he acquired a reputation as a talented and feared author. These texts appear in book form for the first time in Volume 20 of the Complete Works.
Volume 20 of Hermans’ Volledige Werken is published by De Bezige Bij in collaboration with the Willem Frederik Hermans Institute. The Volledige Werken are produced by the Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands. Editors of this volume are Peter Kegel, Bram Oostveen and Marc van Zoggel.
