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...
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An American author of fiction, essays, and drama, Saul Bellow (born 1915) reached the first rank of contemporary fiction with his picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March.Saul Bellow, born of Ru...
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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...
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A sober evaluation of his work leaves no doubt that Saul Bellow is one of the important writers in American literature. As one of two living American Nobel Prize-winners in literature, he inherits the...
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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...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Rita D. Jacobs
It is … [the] seemingly paradoxical currents in Bellow's work, the dignity of life and the comic accident that we exist at all, that are so exhilarating....
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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...
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Critical Essay by Glenn A. Kindilien
Saul Bellow's "Looking for Mr. Green," which records social worker George Grebe's attempt to deliver a relief check in a Chicago ghetto...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Peter M. Axthelm
Moses Herzog, the hero of Bellow's most brilliantly realized confessional novel,… arrives at a unique kind of perception—one which is in relatio...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Earl Rovit
The problematic theme to which Bellow has been irresistibly drawn from Dangling Man to Mr. Sammler's Planet is that of trying to reconcile virtue with the fact of s...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Ralph Berets
Most of Saul Bellow's novels employ polarities that structure the dramatic development of each work. The central character becomes conscious of these polarities a...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Alvin H. Rosenfeld
Bellow has been, right from the start, as much concerned with the invisible worlds opened up by thought and feeling, intuition and intimation, as he has been our b...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Bruce J. Borrus
It should not be surprising that Saul Bellow, our novelist most concerned with the relation between ideas and life, worries about the place of the intellectual in con...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner
A genre has long since defined itself, Nobel-certified: the Saul Bellow Novel. This is the Novel as First-Draft Dissertation: a rumination on the sorry state of the world...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Diane Johnson
Like the earlier Mr. Sammler's, Corde's mission is to be at the moral center of [The Dean's December], the worried and thoughtful person. And at th...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Miller
If Updike is the narrator-as-preacher, nudging his readers to speculate about what it all means, and Nabokov is the narrator-as-aesthete, insisting that his readers pa...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Robert R. Dutton
The themes of Saul Bellow are hardly original: they include the old established counterclaims of the individual versus society and the individual in self-conflict. W...
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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...
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In the following review, Brown asserts that the essays in It All Adds Up “reveal the richness and the variety, and occasionally the contradictions and the discursiveness, of the outstanding nov...
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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...
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In the following review, LaHood offers a laudatory assessment of The Actual.
Saul Bellow can write. He has a Nobel Prize (1976) to show for it. He is also the only novelist to win three National Book ...
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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...
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In the following essay, Pinsker elucidates the central concerns of Bellow's fiction, contending his novels and short stories matter “not only for those who care about the state of Americ...
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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...
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In the following review, Amidon identifies the unifying themes of the works in Collected Stories as the role of memory and the process of Jewish assimilation into American society.
There seems to be a...
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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...
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In the following favorable reviews, Dickstein provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the works in Collected Stories.
Just as we have had an American E. M. Forster who, as first interpreted by L...
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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...
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In the following favorable review, Cross surveys the range of essays in It All Adds Up.
Now in his eightieth year, Saul Bellow is our best living novelist, the principal heir among the writers who eme...
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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 ...
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In the following essay, Goffman explores the significance of the black thief in Mr. Sammler's Planet, maintaining that the thief “is a compact, dramatic version of a recurring Euro-Ameri...
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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...
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In the following favorable review, Wood calls The Actual a slight book, but maintains that it possesses “its own nervous perfection.”
This novella is a ricochet from a talent that has al...
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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 ...
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In the following review, Hensher deems The Actual a brief and amusing novella.
A curious sort of volume, this; readable from end to end in not much more than half an hour, a novella [The Actual] which...
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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...
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Literary awards are old news for Philip Roth, but his latest honor is truly special: The first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, a $40,000 prize named for the late Nob...
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One opened The New York Times expectantly, two days after Saul Bellow's death, ready for the Op-Ed tributes that seemed as certain to appear as The Times itself: Surely one or more of American lite...
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Stockholm (dpa) - Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature since
1945:
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2006 Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
2005 Harold Pinter (Britain)
2004 Elfried...
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It could be said that Irishman Fionn Regan’s music is delicate. It could also be said, and one wouldn’t be wrong in thinking so, that it’s strong, with mighty musicianship and lum...
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Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. cause N.Y. is the writers' olympic village. As it's the olympic village for investment analysts, TV peo...
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Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. Because N.Y. is the writers' olympic site. As it's the olympic site for investment analysts, TV people,...
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A creaky 138-year-old brownstone in Greenwich Village, which for half its life had been home to the neighborhoodâs most delectably artsy couple, has been sold to a kingpin of Manha...
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Mark Harris, best known for baseball novels that included "Bang the Drum Slowly," narrated by the fictional Henry Wiggen, has died. He was 84.Harris died Wednesday at Cottage Hospital, a month afte...
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INNER WORKINGS: LITERARY ESSAYS 2000-2005By J.M. Coetzee Viking, 304 pages, $25.95
Each of the 21 essays included in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 is named for the author whose wo...
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