You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Literature Book of the Year, Sunday Times 'Terrific' Guardian 'Enthralling' Spectator 'Magisterial' Daily Telegraph 'Unsurpassable' New York Review of Books By the time Herzog was published in 1964, Saul Bellow was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America, described in later years by the critic James Wood as ‘the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century.’ Zachary Leader’s biography shows how this prose, with its exhilarating mixture of high culture and low, came into existence. It also traces Bellow’s life away from the desk, as polemicist, teacher, husband, father and lover. Fierce in his loyalties, Bellow was no less fierce in his enmities, combative in defence of his freedoms. Spanning the period from Bellow’s birth in 1915 to the publication of Herzog in 1964, volume one of this biography is the first since Saul Bellow’s death, and the first to discuss his life and work in its entirety.
The final volume of the definitive authorised biography of one of the greatest American writers. ‘A moving testament to one of the last century’s greatest writers’ Sunday Times At forty-nine, Saul Bellow was at the pinnacle of American letters – he was rich, famous and critically acclaimed, with the best yet to come: Mr Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, all his best stories. He went on to win two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. However, away from his desk, Bellow's life was set to become embroiled in controversy: over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. From the women he pursued and his turbulent family relations, to his struggles with cultural relativism and the perceived excesses of civil rights movements, this second and final volume of Zachary Leader's monumental Life of Saul Bellow charts Bellow's heroic energy and will throughout his life, right to the end - where his immense achievements and their costs, to himself and others, became ever more apparent. 'Brilliant' Spectator 'Compelling' Times Literary Supplement 'Riveting' New Statesman 'Superb' New York Times
A never-before-published collection of letters - an intimate self-portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, and Wright Morris. Intimate, ironical, richly observant, and funny, these letters reveal the influcences at work in the man, and illuminate his enduring legacy-the novels that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of the world over. Saul Bellow: Letters is a major literary event and an important edition to Bellow's incomparable body of work.
'Sentence by sentence, page by page, Bellow is simply the best writer we have' The New York Times Book Review In It All Adds Up, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary America over a forty-year period. In sentence after sentence, page after page, readers are offered brilliant perceptions and unusual insights into everyday life in America and the life of the mind. Moving from political figures like Roosevelt and Khrushchev to artists like Mozart, Dostoevsky, and John Cheever, from New York and Chicago to Paris-and including the deeply personal "Autobiography of Ideas"-Bellow, with great humor and wisdom, records the enduring thoughts and opinions of a lifetime of observation, thoughts that speak to us with renewed energy for our times.
Pifer contends that Bellow's fiction is fundamentally radical. Going against the grain of contemporary culture and its secular pieties, he undermines accepted notions of reality and challenges the "orthodoxies" created by materialist values and rationalist thought. Charged by his belief in the soul, his 10 novels test the assumptions of traditional realism. Pifer stresses the importance to Bellow of the invisible world, the longing for revelation, and the capacity to love and to suffer. She also shows how Bellow's hero is a man torn between his modern predilection for secular rationalism and a primordial attachment to the soul, and how he is led to demolish reigning idols of contemporary thought and culture. ISBN 0-8122-8203-5: $29.95.
None
None
This is the definitive collection of short stories by Saul Bellow. Abundant, precise, various, rich and exuberant, the stories display the stylistic and emotional brilliance which characterizes this master of prose. Some stories recount the events of a single day, some are contained in a wider frame; each story is a characteristic combination of observation and a celebration of humanity.