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-American mythologization: blackness as the primitive, the carnal, the return of the repressed.”

In the following essay, Corner traces Bellow's progression from examining “individual consciousness to public truth” in The Dean's December.

In the following essay, Cronin asserts that there is a feminine presence in Bellow's novels.

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 March within the context of mid-twentieth-century American culture.

Most of Saul Bellow's novels employ polarities that structure the dramatic development of each work. The central character becomes conscious of these polarities after he encounters various antagonists who either illustrate one of these dimensions or force the hero to acknowledge them as part of himself. On the one hand, there are the characters who challenge and perhaps even repudiate the definition of self that the hero has formulated. On the other hand, there are the "reality instructors�...

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 busy chronicler of the mundane…. The culture criticism is there sure enough, a spirited reading of the times for all of us to accept or quarrel with, but the fundamental engagement of thought is, in the first place, self-directed, and we, the readers, are let in on it only as it were afterwards. For while the novel of ideas, as Bellow has be...

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 American fiction but also for those worried about the spiritual condition of America itself.”

Moses Herzog, the hero of Bellow's most brilliantly realized confessional novel,… arrives at a unique kind of perception—one which is in relation to nothing and, at the same time, to everything. An examination of this seemingly paradoxical state and of how it is achieved provides an understanding of what may be the ultimate possibility for the modern confessional hero. Herzog's perception relates to nothing, in that it is a simple, quiet decision to stop his confession, a signal ...

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 worthy as any being worked in contemporary fiction, and proof of this is in the unity and persuasiveness of Bellow's oeuvre as compared to any of his contemporaries who might be considered at the same level of seriousness. (p. 36) Bellow's first three novels—Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), and The Adventures of Augie M...

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 many to be among America's finest writers. In two sections, one on meaning, the other on form, I shall highlight distinctive features of this compact work…. First of all, the reader's approach to the book. Are we to take Bellow's feelings about life and society as identical with Sammler's?

In the following positive review, Kazin delineates the central thematic concerns in The Actual.

In the following favorable review, Wood calls The Actual a slight book, but maintains that it possesses “its own nervous perfection.”

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 the tradition of any of his immediate predecessors in American fiction. He has said some kind words about Dreiser, but he is not a direct descendant of Dreiser or of any of the other naturalists. His work does not emerge out of the generation of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, nor does it spring from the social realism that Bellow grew up with in...

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 realize it. Most critics, I think, would agree that Saul Bellow's greatest difficulty lies in his plots…. Bellow has two modes: intense, closely textured, moral; and light, energetic, open. The Victim, Seize the Day, and, yes, Herzog represent the former while Augie March, Sammler, and Humboldt represent the latter…. Bellow...

In the following favorable reviews, Dickstein provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the works in Collected Stories.

In the following favorable review, Cross surveys the range of essays in It All Adds Up.

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 contemporary America, a society that prizes its achievers while it patronizes and occasionally pities its thinkers. What is surprising is that Bellow, at least partially, agrees with the practical American's criticism: if the life of the mind has value, and it surely does for Bellow, its value does not lie in solving the problems of day-to-...

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.”

In the following review, Miller discusses the characters in The Actual as typical Bellovian characters and views Bellow as a lyrical and romantic author.

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 found himself charming, like a hypnotist who puts himself along with his subjects into a trance. But what happens when the fictional juices run out, when a novelist becomes so convinced of his own wisdom, his grasp of the Big Subjects—Western Civilization, The Modern Condition, The Future of Humanity—that fiction seems too fragile ...

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. Like the true comedian, the one who shows the truths of life, Bellow discards the easy laugh in favor of the deeper, cosmic laughter which responds to the human condition…. The ghetto feeling, the feeling of being set apart and yet making a kind of virtue of this separateness, is strong in Bellow's work. His characters are often...

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 that he is splendid. (p. 6) [While in Rumania to attend the deathbed of his wife's mother] Corde is following the progress, back home, of a court case involving the murder of a student. Two blacks are accused of pushing him out of a window to his death. They claim he fell, and that he had anyway been asking for trouble. Corde has encoura...

In the following review, Hensher deems The Actual a brief and amusing novella.

In the following mixed review, Brown outlines what he sees as strengths and weaknesses of the works in Collected Stories.

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.

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 setting seems perfectly ordinary. Is there, however, an additional meaning? Can we see the symbolism of the physical facts? The play, as we shall learn, deals with the various stories told (or retold) by the hero. These stories are "double" in effect because he needs in his present condition to create (or recreate) a new selfȁ...

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 him to take on all the facts and theories about the pathetic and comically exposed condition of civilized man and distribute them like high-class corn so that the chickens come running to them. That is the art of the novelist who can't resist an idea: to evoke, attract that 'pleasing, anxious being', the squawking, dusty, fev...

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. What Bellow offers is a clarity of vision concerning these issues that is, above all, honest. In all of his writing, Bellow faces squarely the timely issue of personal effacement and consequent degradation that every social trend seems to manifest. He never draws away from the frightening implications of an impersonal, mechanical society. The dis...

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 self-consciousness: can modern man attain "dignity," can he live a "good" life when he must assume the traditional function of God, when he himself must judge his own frailties, cowardices, and ignoble motives?… For Bellow, a story-line seems more than anything else a weblike scenario that he weaves more a...

In the following review, Hendry traces Bellow's favorite themes in the tales of Collected Stories.

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, insufficiently formal for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, however well it may translate into Swedish, but not unworthy of that Committee's encouraging noises. About the sorry state of the world there is nothing to be done save accept it, as every Bellow protagonist must learn for himself the way Job di...

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 novelist of his brilliant generation.”

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 pay close attention to his exquisitely detailed observations, Bellow is the narrator-as-taxi driver, telling his readers to cut the nonsense and stop taking this or that fashionable idea seriously. Even though some of his novels are in the third person and others are in the first, it does not seem to make much of a difference; we hear Bellow tal...

[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 his worst. This book has the disquieting effect of encountering an old friend—a good friend—who has undergone some startling decline. But the symptoms and patterns have been there from the mechanical beginnings in Dangling Man and The Victim. They have persisted, notably in the metaphysical obsession with the anthroposophy of Ru...

From the subtitle on—the reference is to a poem by Robert Frost—["Saul Bellow; Drumlin Woodchuck"] is surely one of the most eccentric biographical works since A.J.A. Symons' "The Quest for Corvo." I call it a biographical work because Mr. Harris has written more a quest for Bellow than a conventional biography. "For specific facts you must go to a certified public accountant," he declares, and his indifference to facts in this research-dominate...

Saul Bellow's "Looking for Mr. Green," which records social worker George Grebe's attempt to deliver a relief check in a Chicago ghetto, is typically and correctly read as a search for the real self. But why is the object of the search called Mr. Green? Wouldn't any other name serve this theme as well? The answer is no. Green is used because the story is about more than a search for the self; it is also about how the self in modern society is defined. The story says, in ef...

In the following review, LaHood offers a laudatory assessment of The Actual.

[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 King, Bellow makes serious use of fictional techniques, but even there the essayist-lecturer is always ready to step in, stealing the stage from the fictional characters to make the fiction more "important." Bellow's self-indulgence takes various forms. On occasion it appears as stylistic fiddling—as language design...

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 territory of social description and prescription so largely abandoned by novelists during this century. Bellow has always been conscious of the European literary heritage—whether it was bringing in the rhythms of Yiddish or digesting the intellectual currency of Paris; here it is Dostoevsky he seems to turn to; and if he falls short, then,...

[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 brings to the redemption of the garbage pile of one's own life. He mixes recklessness with a primordial awe, and his philosophic whine concentrates mainly on the petty, where we live. His perception of the unity of the human mind doesn't wash out its diversity. He uses language like a gill. Our worst writers (even when they are, in ...