Michael B. Herzog was born in Romania in the last year of WW II, grew up in post-war Germany and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. He earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and spent forty-five years as a professor and administrator at Gonzaga University. A Danforth Fellow, he has won multiple teaching awards, has written scholarly articles as well as two plays based on medieval poems, and served as Chief of Staff to the President at Gonzaga. While he was teaching the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer for more than three decades, he became increasingly fascinated with the life and art of this pre-eminent medieval poet of England, and began the long process of creating a novel that would capture the spirit and the reality of this remarkable courtier and poet while honoring the work and legacy of an individual who both captured and shaped English culture more than any other author before Shakespeare. Professor Emeritus Herzog is currently working on "completing," in modern English prose, Chaucer's unfinished masterwork: "The Canterbury Tales."