But prior to Bellow and the novelists who emerged alongside him—Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth—there was a profound hesitance at the idea of letting anything as precious as American ...

Soon after Saul Bellow returned to his hometown in 1962 and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, he started donating his papers to the school library. One of the most celebrated novelists ...

Saul Bellow was of two minds about the academy. In a 1957 article for The Nation, entitled “The University as Villain,” he described English departments as being filled with “discouraged people who ...

I’ll confess: I savored “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964,” the first of the two volumes of Zachary Leader’s new biography of Bellow, as if it were cake. Its text is six hundred ...

For Saul Bellow, 1964 was a breakthrough year. With the publication of his sixth book, Herzog, Bellow went from being a favorite of the critics and a select circle of readers to the ranks of novelists ...

“We often stopped before a display of children’s shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them — I rubbed them with butter to ...

Saul Bellow's Ravelstein has been treated less as a novel than a minor miracle: a cause more for celebration than criticism. That an 85-year-old should produce a novel at all was regarded as ...

The intelligent, literate young man at the TV production office where I work—aged 26 or 27—shocked me recently by admitting that he hadn’t read anything by Saul Bellow. My colleague, an English major ...

One of the delightful surprises arising from the spate of books celebrating Saul Bellow’s centenary is the discovery that, for a brief while, Bellow was a film critic. He wrote four essays about ...