Saul Bellow was praised for his vision, his ear for
detail, his humor, and the masterful artistry of his prose. Born of
Russian Jewish parents in Lachine, Quebec in 1915, he was raised in
Chicago. He received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern
University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, and
did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. During the Second
World War he served in the Merchant Marines.
His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944)
and The Victim (1947) are penetrating, Kafka-like
psychological studies. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship and spent two years in Paris and traveling in Europe,
where he began his picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie
March, which went on to win the National Book Award for fiction
in 1954. His later books of fiction include Seize the
Day (1956); Henderson the Rain
King (1959); Mosby's Memoirs and Other
Stories (1968); Mr. Sammler's
Planet (1970); Humboldt's Gift (1975),
which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Dean's
December (1982); More Die of
Heartbreak (1987); Theft (1988); The
Bellarosa Connection (1989);The
Actual (1996); Ravelstein (2000); and,
most recently, Collected Stories(2001). Bellow has also
produced a prolific amount of non-fiction, collected in To
Jerusalem and Back, a personal and literary record of his
sojourn in Israel during several months in 1975, and It All
Adds Up, a collection of memoirs and essays.
Bellow's many awards include the International Literary Prize
for Herzog, for which he became the first American to
receive the prize; the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the
highest literary distinction awarded by France to non-citizens; the
B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award for "excellence in Jewish
Literature"; and America's Democratic Legacy Award of the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the first time this award
has been made to a literary personage. In 1976 Bellow was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature "for the human understanding and
subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his
work."
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
"A mature distillation of Mr. Bellow's work . . . a gem."
-The New York Times
" The work of a great master still locked in unequal combat with
Eros and Time."
-The New York Times Book Review
" [A] wonderful book . . . fully worthy of a place in its author's
vastly esteemed oeuvre."
-Chicago Tribune
"A man's road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to‘exile." So says Harry Trellman, the narrator of the Nobel laureate's latest work, who is by any measure an exile several times over. Trellman's ailing mother and hardworking father consigned him to an orphanage; shady business dealings kept him in the Third World for most of his adulthood. Over the years, his high-school sweetheart, the only woman he ever loved, has grown old in the arms of other men. Now in late middle age, Trellman has returned to the Chicago of his youth to recover what he can of the life that has passed him by. A kind of an affectionate, latter-day "Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," this novella nevertheless carries distinguishing Bellow trademarks: the mythically cosmopolitan, clubby Chicago where bankers quote Hamlet and intellectuals stumble into wealth; the Emersonian turns of phrase ("`Distance' is a formality. The mind takes no real notice of it") grounded in Yiddish earthiness ("He's got a condom over his heart"); and, deeper than these, Bellow's passionate eroticism, wherein, in order to get at the "actual" beloved, one must survive sex, transgression, divorce and ménages à trois, whether of the body or the spirit. Bellow is a conservative in the best sense: he calls his readers constantly back to what they can't help but believe, at the same time insisting, as Trellman puts it, on a common recognition "that the powers of our human genius are present where one least expects them." As usual in Bellow's more recent fiction, plot is secondary here. So is character, for the hero of this small love-story is character itself. (May)
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
"A mature distillation of Mr. Bellow's work . . . a gem."
-The New York Times
" The work of a great master still locked in unequal combat with
Eros and Time."
-The New York Times Book Review
" [A] wonderful book . . . fully worthy of a place in its author's
vastly esteemed oeuvre."
-Chicago Tribune
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