Saul Bellow Summary

Biography EssaySaul Bellow is now recognized as one of the most important writers in American literature. As one of two living American Nobel Prize-winners in literature, he inherits the mantle of Hem... Read more

Saul Bellow claims the writer is a moralist, obliged to affirm the possibilities for individual life in the human community. Despite literary realism's "myth of the diminished man" and disparagement o... Read more

Throughout a long and prolific career, Saul Bellow has shown himself to be a stylist equally at ease with the comic and tragic voices. As a writer who often explores the most sensitive and difficult p... Read more

Critical Essay by Roger Jones What make [Mr. Sammler's Planet] worth writing about, I feel, is its level of artistic organisation, a significant achievement for Bellow, already considered by ma... Read more

Critical Essay by Cynthia Ozick [Bellow is] amused by a crucifix (as if it were a toy without a history); and about sex he's a baby. But beyond this, one reads him with the seriousness one brin... Read more

Critical Essay by John Gardner [Bellow] is actually not a novelist at heart but an essayist disguised as a writer of fiction. In Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, and Henderson the Rain Ki... Read more

Critical Essay by Irving Malin In the stage directions [for The Last Analysis], Bellow indicates that the action of his play occurs in a "two-story loft in a warehouse…." The sett... Read more

Critical Essay by Seymour Epstein The failures of Western civilization and the pleasures of it spin out the thematic thread that runs through the novels under discussion here. As a theme, it is as wor... Read more

Critical Essay by M. A. Klug Saul Bellow has been something of a resident alien among recent American novelists. While his work is soaked in American experience, it does not appear to develop out of t... Read more

Critical Essay by Keith Opdahl We can probably learn more about a writer from his difficulties than from his triumphs. His struggles reveal his intention and the obstacles that he must overcome to rea... Read more

Critical Essay by V. S. Pritchett Saul Bellow has the most effusive intelligence of living American novelists. Even when he is only clever he has a kind of spirited intellectual vanity that enables hi... Read more

Critical Essay by Katha Pollitt As long as Bellow gave us fictional richness, one would have had to be stern indeed to resist his charm merely because he gave away, every now and then, that he too fou... Read more

Critical Essay by Melvyn Bragg The Dean's December might not be vintage Bellow but then he probably grew bored with vintage Bellow. It is new ground, seeking to retrieve, most boldly, the terri... Read more

Critical Essay by David Evanier [In The Dean's December] we have the bare bones of Bellow: the novel as essay, stripped of the whimsey and decoration of character and fanciful prose. Bellow at ... Read more

Critical Essay by James Atlas From the subtitle on—the reference is to a poem by Robert Frost—["Saul Bellow; Drumlin Woodchuck"] is surely one of the most eccentric biograp... Read more

In the following review, Miller discusses the characters in The Actual as typical Bellovian characters and views Bellow as a lyrical and romantic author. A very astute, very old Jewish trillionaire is... Read more

In the following essay, Corner traces Bellow's progression from examining “individual consciousness to public truth” in The Dean's December. Can the novel, at the end of th... Read more

In the following review, Hendry traces Bellow's favorite themes in the tales of Collected Stories. With Bellow nearing 90, there has to be ‘A Collected’, though personally I... Read more

In the following essay, Cronin asserts that there is a feminine presence in Bellow's novels. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is... Read more

In the following mixed review, Brown outlines what he sees as strengths and weaknesses of the works in Collected Stories. The collection [Collected Stories] contains thirteen stories originally publis... Read more

In the following essay, Valiunas traces Bellow's development as an author through his first three novels—Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March—placing Augie ... Read more

In the following review, Tuttleton traces Bellow's literary development and contends that The Actual “is about a great many things that are not as simple as they at first seem.” S... Read more

In the following positive review, Kazin delineates the central thematic concerns in The Actual. Saul Bellow will be eighty-two this summer. Not long ago, he told Playboy, he had been near death after ... Read more