Saul Bellow (1915 - )

1. Saul Bellow (1915 - )

2. Life • Born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada after his parents had migrated there from Russia. • Jewish novelist. • Attended the University of Chicago in 1933. • Studied at the Northwestern University and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology and sociology in 1937.

3. Works • Dangling Man (1944), • The Victim (1947), • The Adventures of Augie March (1953), • Henderson the Rain King (1958), • Herzog (1964), • Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970).

4. Works • Humboldt’s Gift (1975), • The Dean’s December (1981), • More Die of Heartbreak (1987),

5. Works • His short stories • Mosby’s Menoir and Other Stories (1968), • Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) • Something to Remember Me By (1993). • He received the Nobel Prize in 1976.

6. Features • interpreting the struggle of city dwellers to define their roles and responsibility in the modern world. • themes about displacement, alienation, masochism, and modern urban man’s search for meaningful identity. • frequent criticism of modern American life is both bitter and loving.

7. His sense of irony is polished, which strengthens the force in narration. • He is well known for his wide range of interest, for his flexibility and diversity of style and idiom, for his eloquence of nostalgia, invective, and lamentation, for his brisk movement of narration, and his rich, vigorous, direct, personal, pungent prose style with conversational casualness.

8. His writing is full of wit, references and traces of modern dialects of urban areas. • He follows the realistic tradition in literature and stresses the truthful representation of life as it is.

9. He is influenced by modernistic literature and thus realism, romanticism, and existentialism have all left their imprint on his work.

10. Saul Bellow’s themes • Saul Bellow is the first important Jewish novelist to begin publishing in the mid-1940s. His novels present the problems of the modern urban man in search of his identity. This is a common theme that many writers develop in the postwar era. But he does it with the Jewish character and with particular Jewish flavor.

11. He is often acclaimed as the best writer after Hemingway and Faulkner. for “the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture are combined in his work”, as the citation states. His success owes much to a double heritage of modernist concerns and Jewish humanist responsibility.

12. Herzog • About the midlife crisis of a Jewish man named Moses E. Herzog. • In a nod to the epistolary novels of early British literature, letters from the protagonist constitute much of the text. • It won the 1965 National Book Award for Fiction. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

13. Style of the Novel • The beauty of the novel lies in the dissection of Herzog's mind. In typical Bellow style, the descriptions of characters' emotions and physical features are rich in wit and energy. Herzog's relationships are the central theme of the novel, not just with women and friends, but also society and himself.

14. Herzog's own thoughts and thought processes are laid bare in the letters he writes. As the novel progresses, the letters (represented in italics) become fewer and fewer. This seems to mirror the healing of the narrator's mind, as his attention turns from his inner struggles towards the options offered by his current situation – not having to be a scholar, the possibility of starting afresh with Ramona, and so on. • In other words, the psychological clarification that is taking place at the level of content is reflected stylistically in the movement from a predominantly epistolary mode towards a more linearly organized narrative.