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 public and private aspects of contemporary life, he has won the respect of critics but has, in the 1980s and 1990s, suffered the approbation of feminist critics for perceived sexist and misogynist portraits of female characters and of leftist critics for alleged conservative political and cultural values.

Bellow was among the first American writers to treat anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in fiction. He addressed cultural anti-Semitism in The Victim (1947); religious anti-Semitism in The Adventures of Augie March (1953); economic and social anti-Semitism in "The Old System" (1967); and violent anti-Semitism in Herzog (1964), "Mosby's Memoirs" (1968), and National Book Award winner Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). The Holocaust is rarely at the thematic center of Bellow's novels; yet, it...