After World War II, Hermans tried to live off his writing exclusively, but as his country was recovering from the Occupation, he had no opportunity to sustain himself.

He published three collections of short stories from 1948 to 1957, chief among them the novella The House of Refuge (1952), and in 1958 became lecturer in physical geography at Groningen University, a position he retained until his move to Paris, France, in 1973.

Hermans is considered one of De Grote Drie, the three most important authors in the Netherlands in the postwar period, along with Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve.

His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were breadbakers in the town of Brielle, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and from the ranks of the "lower bourgeoisie.

From 1913 to 1929, they lived on the second floor[a] of an apartment in the "Old West" part of Amsterdam, near the center of the city, in a neighbourhood with blocks built in 1910 specially to accommodate schoolteachers.

Though his own career was unremarkable, he had great ambitions for his two children, both of whom he sent to the prestigious Barlaeus Gymnasium, evidently to have them prepared for a college education.

Hermans's intelligence first emerged at grammar school, where he was included in the selection of four boys who were taught a more challenging Arithmetic course than was demanded of the other classmates.

[4] Apart from that, he followed the standard curriculum: Reading, Writing, Geography (with attention to the Dutch Indies), Native History, Gymnastics, and Singing.

When the school staged a performance of Sophocles's Antigone, Hermans was given a minor role, but the play left a lasting impression upon him: "It was my first introduction to the kind of literature that could swipe away the everyday world like a dull nightmare.

In 1972, after accusations by among others the Calvinist Member of Parliament and later minister Jan de Koning that Hermans was using his time writing instead of lecturing, a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the matter.

It can be read as a roman à clef and was entirely written on the empty sides of university letters, according to Hermans's alter ego Zomerplaag "to do something useful with this expensive paper that would normally disappear unread in the garbage bin, polluting the environment".

Hermans's characters are personifications of this state of affairs, loners who continuously misinterpret the reality surrounding them, unable to do something meaningful with other interpretive views when confronted with them, victims to the mercy of chance, misunderstanding.

Specific elements of this pessimistic worldview are kindred to Marquis de Sade, Heinrich von Kleist, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Hermans was notorious for his polemics, as was demonstrated in particular in the 'Weinreb affair', when he played a key role in the unmasking of a Jewish imposter who claimed to have been a resistance fighter helping other Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Being married to a non-white woman, Hermans remained totally unrepentant and did not visit his birthplace again until 1993 for a book presentation, after the City Council had ended that status on his insistence.

In 2021, Archipelago Books published Hermans' novel Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder (again translated by David Colmer) as A Guardian Angel Recalls.

[26] This bleakly humorous work, set on the eve of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, follows the travails of Alberegt, a lovelorn public prosecutor who has just seen off his mistress, a German-Jewish refugee steaming to the safety of America.

Despite the determined efforts of his guardian angel, a moment's inattention leads to a catastrophe that Alberget is ill-equipped to handle, just as the German war machine begins its onslaught on the poorly prepared Dutch.