Synopses & Reviews
and#147;An enduring testament and prophecy.and#8221; and#150;Chicago Sun-Times
Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a and#147;registrar of madness,and#8221; a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities).and#160; His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul.and#160; and#147;Sorry for all and sore at heart,and#8221; he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammlerand#151;who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beingsand#151;a good life is one in which a person does what is and#147;required of him.and#8221; To know and to meet the and#147;terms of the contractand#8221; was as true a life as one could live.and#160; At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.
This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Stanley Crouch.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500and#160;titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theand#160;series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateand#160;translations by award-winning translators.
Review
"Mr. Bellow's gift for delineating the American scene...is unrivaled." —
Michiko Kakutani, in
The New York Times
"A feast.... One of the most rewarding collections of the year." —San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"A mature distillation of Mr. Bellow's work . . . a gem."
-The New York Times
" The work of a great master still locked in unequal combat with Eros and Time."
-The New York Times Book Review
" [A] wonderful book . . . fully worthy of a place in its author's vastly esteemed oeuvre."
-Chicago Tribune
Review
"A feast of language, situations, characters, ironies, and a controlled moral intelligence . . . Bellows rapport with his central character seems to me novel writing in the grand style of a Tolstoy—subjective, complete, heroic." —
Chicago Tribune
"Herzog has the range, depth, intensity, verbal brilliance, and imaginative fullness—the mind and heart—which we may expect only of a novel that is unmistakably destined to last." —Newsweek
"A masterpiece" —The New York Times Book Review
Review
The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. (Martin Amis)
If there's a candidate for the Great American Novel, I think this is it. (Salman Rushdie)
Review
The magic still sparks and flashes on the page...Masterful in its thoroughness and intricacy...the prose rings as clearly as a meditation bell. Roland Merullo,
The Philadelphia Inquirer (front-page review)
This book rings with laughter and joy....Ravelstein is an extraordinary character...it is hard not to feel privileged at being allowed a glimpse into a human connection as intimate and rewarding as this one. Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World (front-page review)
"With his new novel, Saul Bellow proves that he still dominates. . . . Ravelstein is full of heart and wisdom, and I want to praise it without a pinch of qualification. Sven Birkerts, Esquire
A cause for celebration...Bellow hugs the modern world hard in this novel...Ravelstein is rich, deep, and unnervingly entertaining. Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times Book Review (front-page review)
Review
"I think it A Work of Genius. I think it The Work of a Genius. I think it brilliant, splendid, etc. If there is literature (and this proves there is), this is where it's at."
Review
"Bellow's incremental sound--or noise--rejects imitation the way the human immune system will reject foreign tissue. There are no part-Bellows or next-generation Bellows; there are no literary descendants."
Review
"Bellow's special appeal is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon."
Review
"Saul Bellow is probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth-century--where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical. Reading Bellow is a special way of being alive."
Review
"No modern writer has better constructed this anxious and very serious comedy, more clearly defined the encounter between thought and the labyrinth, more exactly captured the strange Byzantine, parrot-filled meeting places of modern thought, modern heart, and modern silence."
Review
"Sharp, erudite, beautifully measured . . . [Bellow] is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world."
Review
"Bellow's prose is poetic, wistful and ironic, rich in humor and packed with ideas . . . If William Faulkner was the most celebrated American novelist of the twentieth century's first half, Saul Bellow has owned the second fifty years."
Review
“A kind of Dostoyevskian nightmare…written with unusual power and insight.” -The New York Times
Review
“Bellow evokes places, ideas, people…on the edge of history, an inch from disaster, yet brimming with argument and words…. An impassioned and thoughtful book.” -
The New York Times Book Review “Essentially a plea for a greater understanding of the state of Israel by one of its most articulate admirers.” -The Times
Review
“Darkly funny…taut, compressed, with splendid dialogue” -The Sunday times (London)
Review
“One of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the Depression and the war,” -Edmund Wilson,
The New Yorker
“In this imaginative journal, set against fresh and vivid scenes in Chicago, the author has outlined what must seem to many others an uncannily accurate delineation of themselves.” -The New York Times
“An extraordinary first novel.” -The Observer
Review
and#8220;The most important writer in English in the second half of the twentieth centuryand#8230;Bellowand#8217;s oeuvre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary.and#8221; and#8211;Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times (London)
Review
“[Bellows] body of work is more capacious of imagination and language than anyone elses…If theres a candidate for the Great American Novel, I think this is it.” -Salman Rushdie, The Sunday Times (London)
Synopsis
"The best novel to come out of America-or England-for a generation."
V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books
In this unique noir masterpiece by the incomparable Saul Bellow, a young man is sucked into the mysterious, heat-filled vortex of New York City. Asa Leventhal, a temporary bachelor with his wife away on a visit to her mother, attempts to find relief from a Gotham heat wave, only to be accosted in the park by a down-at-the-heels stranger who accuses Leventhal of ruining his life. Unable to shake the stranger loose, Leventhal is led by his own self-doubts and suspicions into a nightmare of paranoia and fear.
This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by National Book Award winner Norman Rush.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America's greatest living writers. For more than sixty years he has stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Now collected for the first time in one volume and chosen by the author himself are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," "Leaving the Yellow House," and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence." With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. This is a volume to treasure for longtime Bellow fans, and an excellent introduction for new readers.
Synopsis
Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Bellow's first novel documents Joseph's psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.
Synopsis
The work of a great master still locked in unequal combat with Eros and Time.” The New York Times Book Review
In this dazzling work of fiction, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow writes comically and wisely about the tenacious claims of first love. Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman, has never belonged anywhere and is as awkward in his human attachments as he is gifted in observing the people around him. But Harry's observational talents have not gone unnoticed by "trillionaire" Sigmund Adletsky, who retains Harry as his advisor. Soon the old man discovers Harry's intense forty-year passion for a twice-divorced interior designer, Amy Wustrin. At the exhumation and reburial of her husband, Harry is provided, thanks to Sigmund, perhaps the final means for disclosing feelings amassed over a lifetime. Written late in Bellow's career, The Actual is a maestro's dissection of the affairs of the heart.
This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Joseph O'Neill.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.
Synopsis
Two twentieth-century literary masterpieces from the Nobel Prize winnerSaul Bellow?s Pulitzer Prize?winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie?s life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and he?s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.
Synopsis
As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous,
The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that isto say the leasteccentric.
Synopsis
Originally published in 1953, Saul Bellow's modern picaresque tale grandly illustrates twentieth-century man's restless pursuit of an elusive meaning. Augie March, a young man growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression, doesn't understand success on other people's terms. Fleeing to Mexico in search of something to fill his restless soul and soothe his hunger for adventure, Augie latches on to a wild succession of occupations until his journey brings him full circle. Yet beneath Augie's carefree nature lies a reflective person with a strong sense of responsibility to both himself and others, who in the end achieves a success of his own making. A modern-day Columbus, Augie March is a man searching not for land but for self and soul and, ultimately, for his place in the world.
Synopsis
Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of
More Die of Heartbreak, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described "plant visionary." While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from "bliss to breakdown." Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involving his unusual lady-friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out why gifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves "knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life."
Synopsis
Saul Bellow's fiction, honored by a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer, among other awards, has made him a literary giant. Now the man himself and a lifetime of his insightful views on a range of topics spring off the page in this, his first nonfiction collection, which encompasses articles, lectures, essays, travel pieces, and an "Autobiography of Ideas." It All Adds Up is a fascinating journey through literary America over the last forty years, guided by one of the "most gifted chroniclers in the Western World" (The London Times).
Synopsis
Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a andldquo;registrar of madness,andrdquo; a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities).and#160; His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul.and#160; andldquo;Sorry for all and sore at heart,andrdquo; he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammlerandmdash;who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beingsandmdash;a good life is one in which a person does what is andldquo;required of him.andrdquo; To know and to meet the andldquo;terms of the contractandrdquo; was as true a life as one could live.and#160; At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.
- Winner of the National Book Award
Synopsis
Deftly interweaving humor and pathos, Saul Bellow evokes in the climactic events of one day the full drama of one man's search to affirm his own worth and humanity.
Synopsis
Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.
Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.
Synopsis
A trio of short works by the Nobel laureate and "greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century" (James Wood, The New Republic)
While Saul Bellow is known best for his longer fiction in award-winning novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, Something to Remember Me By will draw new readers to Bellow as it showcases his extraordinary gift for creating memorable characters within a smaller canvas.
The loss of a ring in A Theft helps an oft-married woman understand her own wisdom and capacity for love. In The Bellarosa Connection, Harry Fonstein has escaped from Nazi brutality with the help of an underground organization masterminded by the legendary Broadway impresario Billy Rose, and his story continues in America . In the title story, seventeen-year-old Louiewhose mother is dying of cancerstrays far from home and finds not solace but humiliation and, ultimately, the blessing of his father's wrath. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Nicole Krauss.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of
More Die of Heartbreak, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described "plant visionary." While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from "bliss to breakdown." Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involving his unusual lady-friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out why gifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves "knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life."
Synopsis
As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous,
The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that isto say the leasteccentric.
Synopsis
Two twentieth-century literary masterpieces from the Nobel Prize winnerSaul Bellow?s Pulitzer Prize?winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie?s life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and he?s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.
Synopsis
I think it A Work of genius, I think it The Work of a Genius, I think it brilliant, splendid, etc. If there is literature (and this proves there is) this is where its at.” John Cheever Saul Bellows Pulitzer Prize-winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Dleisher. At the time of Humboldts death, Charlies life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and hes enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic Mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.
This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
An essential masterwork by Nobel laureate Saul Bellow now with an introduction by J. M. Coetzee
Expecting to be inducted into the army to fight in World War II, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Saul Bellow's first novel documents Joseph's psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
The Adventures of Augie March is the great American Novel. Search no further.” Martin Amis
As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this novel by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Deptression. A born recruit,” Augie makes himself available for a series of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as unworthy. His own oddity is reflected in the companions he encountersplungers, schemers, risk-takers, and hole-and corner” operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures. This Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by celebrated writer and critic Christopher Hitchens, makes a literary masterpiece available to a new generation of readers.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellows eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellows vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it.” Chicago Sun-Times
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once cast him as the type that loses the girl”), and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope
.
This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Cynthia Ozick.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Synopsis
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.
This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around himhe has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friendsHerzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart.
This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Philip Roth.
Synopsis
Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America's greatest living writers. For more than sixty years he has stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Now collected for the first time in one volume and chosen by the author himself are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," "Leaving the Yellow House," and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence." With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. This is a volume to treasure for longtime Bellow fans, and an excellent introduction for new readers.
About the Author
Praised for his vision, his ear for detail, his humor, and the masterful artistry of his prose, Saul Bellow was born of Russian Jewish parents in Lachine, Quebec in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. During the Second World War he served in the Merchant Marines.
His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) are penetrating, Kafka-like psychological studies. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Paris and traveling in Europe, where he began his picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March, which went on to win the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. His later books of fiction include Seize the Day (1956); Henderson the Rain King (1959); Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (1968); Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970); Humboldt's Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Dean's December (1982); More Die of Heartbreak (1987); Theft (1988); The Bellarosa Connection (1989); The Actual (1996); Ravelstein (2000); and, most recently, Collected Stories (2001). Bellow has also produced a prolific amount of non-fiction, collected in To Jerusalem and Back, a personal and literary record of his sojourn in Israel during several months in 1975, and It All Adds Up, a collection of memoirs and essays.
Bellow's many awards include the International Literary Prize for Herzog, for which he became the first American to receive the prize; the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by France to non-citizens; the B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award for "excellence in Jewish Literature"; and America's Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the first time this award has been made to a literary personage. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work."
Table of Contents
Preface
Mozart: An Overture
Part One: Riding Off in All Directions
In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt
Literary Notes on Khrushchev
The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them
A Talk with the Yellow Kid
Part Two: Writers, Intellectuals, Politics
The Sealed Treasure
Facts That Put Fancy to Flight
White House and Artists
A Matter of the Soul
An Interview with Myself
Nobel Lecture
Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence
Part Three: The Distracted Public
The Jefferson Lectures
The Distracted Public
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About
Part Four: Thoughts in Transition
Spanish Letter
Illinois Journey
Israel: The Six-Day War
New York: World-Famous Impossibility
The Day They Signed the Treaty
My Paris
Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is
Vermont: The Good Place
Winter in Tuscany
Part Five: A Few Farewells
Isaac Rosenfeld
John Berryman
John Cheever
Allan Bloom
William Arrowsmith
Part Six: Impressions and Notions
A Half Life
A Second Half Life