In 1960 Allan Bloom published an essay on Shakespeare's Othello in the American Political Science Review. It led to an exchange on the question of whether political theorists could learn from or had anything to contribute to the study of poetry. Bloom argued...

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. New York: Viking, 2000, 224 pp., $24.95. Watch out! This review isn't going to be particularly objective. I've read every word that Saul Bellow has written (and some that he hasn't), and I admire him as one of...

Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate and dean of Jewish-American fiction, passed away on Tuesday, April 5. He was 89. Bellow, in such novels as Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler's Planet and, more recently, Ravelstein, examined the persistent anxieties of...

In the following essay, Nichols deems Ravelstein a book about ideas, contending that “the biggest mistake that reviewers make is their failure to appreciate both the political and intellectual weight” of the novel.

In the following essay, Davis discusses Ravelstein as a comic tragedy.

In the following review, Hitchens provides a thematic analysis of Ravelstein and calls the book “a novelistic and realistic memoir” of the late author Allan Bloom.