| Saul Bellow |
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He is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening. While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Paris , he wrote most of his best-known novel, '' The Adventures Of Augie March ''. EARLY LIFE He was born Solomon (nicknamed 'Sollie') Bellows in ''. John Podhoretz , a student at the University Of Chicago , said that Bellow and Allan Bloom , a close friend of Bellow (see '' Ravelstein ''), 'inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air'. Here is Podhoretz on Bellow's physical appearance (see a Hollywood talent scout spotted Bellow’s photograph on the back flap of the dust jacket of his second novel, ''The Victim'', and offered him a Screen Test .) He was neat, precise, slight and thin. He would speak for three or four minutes and when he had finished, you realised that what he had just done was spontaneously speak a beautifully written essay.' CAREER Bellow taught at the University Of Minnesota , New York University , Princeton , the University Of Chicago , Bard College and Boston University where he cotaught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss ''Seize the Day''). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow relocated in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts , where he died on April 5 , 2005 , at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir he harim of Brattleboro , Vermont . Bellow began his undergraduate studies at the University Of Chicago but left after two years to complete his degree not in English, but in Anthropology at Northwestern University . It has been suggested that the study of anthropology had an interesting influence on his literary style. Before Bellow started his career as a writer he wrote book reviews for ten dollars apiece. His early works earned him the reputation as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th Century , and by his death he was regarded by many as the greatest living novelist in English. He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists— William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville , Hawthorne , and Twain of the 20th century." James Wood , in a eulogy of Bellow in '' The New Republic '', wrote: :I judged all modern prose by his. Unfair, certainly, because he made even the fleet-footed—the cadences jostling the jivey Yiddish rhythms, the great teeming democracy of the big novels, the crooks and frauds and intellectuals who loudly people the brilliant sensorium of the fiction. All of this is true enough; John Cheever , in his journals, lamented that, alongside Bellow's fiction, his stories seemed like mere suburban splinters. Ian McEwan wisely suggested last week that British writers and critics may have been attracted to Bellow precisely because he kept alive a Dickensian amplitude now lacking in the English novel. But nobody mentioned the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself. [... [I]n truth, I could not thank him enough when he was alive, and I cannot now.Wood, James, 'Gratitude', ''New Republic'', 00286583, 4/25/2005, Vol. 232, Issue 15 CRITICISM Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the 19th century European novel. The characters in his later novels did not ring true, his critics said. Herzog, Henderson, and the other "larger than life" characters in his later novels seemed to be fashioned from the author's philosophical obsessions, not from real life. His characters were seen as vehicles for his philosophical brooding or opportunities to display his erudition. Bellow's account of his own 1975 trip to Israel, ''''. Bellow, Chomsky wrote, "sees an Israel where ‘almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare,’ where the people ‘think so hard, and so much’ as they ‘farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and finally create an army of tough fighters.’ In an interview in the March 7, 1988 '' New Yorker '', Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning Multiculturalism , "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus ? The Proust of the Papuans ?" The taunt was seen by some as a slight against non-Western literature and philosophy. Bellow at first claimed to have been misquoted. Later, writing in his defense in the New York Times , he said, "The scandal is entirely Journalistic in origin ...I may be one of the few people who have read a Papuan novel... Always foolishly trying to explain and edify allcomers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see." In his later years, Bellow could be very curmudgeonly, as for example when he said, " California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that." Chicago writer , Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend.' But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist . But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love ''Seize the Day''." QUOTATIONS "I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterises prayer too, and the eye of the storm." "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." BIBLIOGRAPHY Fiction
Essays Editorialship
On Bellow
SEE ALSO Notes EXTERNAL LINKS
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