Saul Bellow

January 12, 2007
Nobel Prize winning author and acclaimed playwright Bellow has an indelible place in American letters. This compendium, the second in a series edited by Wood, follows a 1944-1953 collection, and includes three prominent novels-Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog-considered some of the finest examples of post-war American literature. Dark, devastating and funny, Bellow's writing reflects the solitude and isolation of the immigrant experience-a Russian-Jewish emigre, Bellow grew up in the Jewish ghettos of Canada, and then Chicago-as well as the troubled predicament of Judaism in post-war society. Wood, a senior editor of the New Republic, co-taught with Bellow at Boston University; he provides annotation and a helpful chronology of Bellow's life, placing these three works into context. Readers interested in analysis may be disappointed, as by and large Wood lets the text speak for itself, but the supplementary material will prove instructive for any reader, irrespective of their familiarity with the material.

October 1, 2010

The letters gathered here disclose a fertile mind harnessed to a febrile temperament. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was acclaimed as a major Jewish American novelist of ideas, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. His novels are being enshrined as classics in the "Library of America" series. In his epistles to literary agents, publishers, childhood friends, lovers, wives, academic colleagues, and fellow authors (notably Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Robert Penn Warren, and Ralph Ellison) Bellow could convey wit, humor, graciousness, and charm; mercurially, he could also be malicious, derisive, and vindictive. Yet most would acknowledge his sedulous mastery of craft. He had a long, productive literary life and a notoriously public one. The letters in this volume, which date from 1932 to 2005, have been selected from a much larger cache of correspondence and are creditably edited by essayist and novelist Taylor (graduate writing faculty, The New School). VERDICT Recommended for readers familiar with Bellow's novels and his literary circle.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

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