Download or read book The Life of Saul Bellow written by Zachary Leader and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When this second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow opens, Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters - rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing some of his greatest fiction (Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, all his best stories), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in volume 1. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. Bellow's relations with women were often fraught. In the 1960s he was compulsively promiscuous (even as he inveighed against sexual liberation). The women he pursued, the ones he married and those with whom he had affairs, were intelligent, attractive and strong-willed. At eighty-five he fathered his fourth child, a daughter, with his fifth wife. His three sons, whom he loved, could be as volatile as he was, and their relations with their father were often troubled. Although an early and engaged supporter of civil rights, in the second half of his life Bellow was angered by the excesses of Black Power. An opponent of cultural relativism, he exercised great influence in literary and intellectual circles, advising a host of institutes and foundations, helping those he approved of, hindering those of whom he disapproved. In making his case, he could be cutting and rude; he could also be charming, loyal, and funny. Bellow's heroic energy and will are clear to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, are also clear.
Download or read book The Life of Saul Bellow Volume 1 written by Zachary Leader and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of his adult life, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of, among other awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Life of Saul Bellow, by the literary scholar and biographer Zachary Leader, draws on unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist’s relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow’s writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist’s development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities—as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American.
Download or read book Bellow s People How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art written by David Mikics and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading literary critic’s innovative study of how the Nobel Prize–winning author turned life into art. Saul Bellow was the most lauded American writer of the twentieth century—the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the only novelist to be awarded the National Book Award in Fiction three times. Preeminently a novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings, Bellow filled his work with vibrant, garrulous, particular people—people who are somehow exceptionally alive on the page. In Bellow’s People, literary historian and critic David Mikics explores Bellow’s life and work through the real-life relationships and friendships that Bellow transmuted into the genius of his art. Mikics covers ten of the extraordinary people who mattered most to Bellow, such as his irascible older brother, Morrie, a key inspiration for The Adventures of Augie March; the writer Delmore Schwartz and the philosopher Allan Bloom, who were the originals for the protagonists of Humboldt’s Gift and Ravelstein; the novelist Ralph Ellison, with whom he shared a house every summer in the late 1950s, when Ellison was coming off the mammoth success of Invisible Man and Bellow was trying to write Herzog; and Bellow’s wife, Sondra Tschacbasov, and his best friend, Jack Ludwig, whose love affair Bellow fictionalized in Herzog. A perfect introduction to Bellow’s life and work, Bellow’s People is an incisive critical study of the novelist and a memorable account of a vibrant and tempestuous circle of midcentury American intellectuals.
Download or read book Saul Bellow s Heart written by Greg Bellow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The son of the Nobel Prize-winning author of Humboldt's Gift describes the early, lighthearted years of his father's life, before his hardened social views created a rift that lead to a difficult relationship between them.
Download or read book The Victim written by Saul Bellow and published by Odyssey Editions. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's sweltering summer in New York City, and Asa Leventhal is alone. His co-workers ignore or condescend to him, his wife is away with her mother, and his estranged brother has run off, abandoning his wife and two sons. One night, Leventhal is confronted by a stranger--'one of those guys who want you to think they can see to the bottom of your soul'--who reveals himself to be a marginal figure from his distant past. Leventhal, accused of ruining the man's life, becomes shocked and dismissive, vehemently denying any part in the man's unhappy lot. But as time passes, he is increasingly unable to separate his own good fortune from the bad luck of this down-and-out stranger, who will not leave him be. A brief, haunting rumination on the vagaries of fate and responsibility, The Victim is, in the words of Norman Rush, Saul Bellow's "purest creation."
Download or read book Saul Bellow written by Saul Bellow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dangling Man written by Saul Bellow and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.
Download or read book There Is Simply Too Much to Think About written by Saul Bellow and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A sweeping collection and a tribute to one of the most influential, daring, and visionary minds of the twentieth century The year 2015 marks several literary milestones: the centennial of Saul Bellow's birth, the tenth anniversary of his death, and the publication of Zachary Leader's much anticipated biography. Bellow, a Nobel Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and the only novelist to receive three National Book awards, has long been regarded as one of America's most cherished authors. Here, Benjamin Taylor, editor of the acclaimed Saul Bellow: Letters, presents lesser-known aspects of the iconic writer. Arranged chronologically, this literary time capsule displays the full extent of Bellow's nonfiction, including criticism, interviews, speeches, and other reflections, tracing his career from his initial success as a novelist until the end of his life. Bringing together six classic pieces with an abundance of previously uncollected material, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About is a powerful reminder not only of Bellow's genius but also of his enduring place in the western canon and is sure to be widely reviewed and talked about for years to come"--
Download or read book More Die of Heartbreak written by Saul Bellow and published by Odyssey Editions. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In More Die of Heartbreak, our erratic narrator explains to his audience that he must abandon Paris for the Midwest. Of course, Kenneth merely wants to be closer to his beloved uncle, the world-famous botanist Benn Crader, to receive the older man’s worldly wisdom. The mercurial Benn, however, struggles to put down roots himself, constantly departing for the forests of India, the mountains of China, the jungles of Brazil, or even the Antarctic. Why does he travel so much? Submerging himself in botanical studies seem insufficient, and he hunts relentlessly for more carnal satisfaction. More Die of Heartbreak has all the humor of a French farce, and all the brooding darkness of a Hitchcock film. From this tragicomedy Bellow unravels a brilliant and sinister examination of contemporary sexuality, asking why even the most noble pursuits often end in mundane disillusionment.
Download or read book The Life of Saul Bellow Volume 2 written by Zachary Leader and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in the life of literary giant Saul Bellow, vividly capturing a personal life that was always tumultuous and career that never ceased being triumphant. Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters--rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing in the latter half of his life some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in the first. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. In this stunning second volume, Zachary Leader shows that Bellow's heroic energy and will were present to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, continue to be worth the examination of this vivid work of literary scholarship.
Download or read book Bellow written by James Atlas and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2012-08-08 with total page 909 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events—the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties—and amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, which generated a vibrant new literature. Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history. Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein.
Download or read book Conversations with Saul Bellow written by Saul Bellow and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1994 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned writer Saul Bellow reflects on the times in which we live and the craft of writing. Bellow asks what meaningful words are left to write in the face of such events as revolutions, world wars, the atom bomb, and who would take the time to read them if new words were found or invented. Fortunately Faulkner is no longer alive, and unfortunately, neither is Hemingway.
Download or read book To Jerusalem and Back written by Saul Bellow and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he visited Israel in 1975, Saul Bellow kept an account of his experiences and impressions. It grew into an impassioned and thoughtful book. As he wryly notes, "If you want everyone to love you, don't discuss Israeli politics." But discuss them is very much what he does. Through quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow evokes places, ideas, and people, reaching a sharp picture of contemporary Israel. The reader is offered a wonderful panorama of an ancient and modern world city. Like every other visitor to Israel, Bellow tumbles into "a gale of conversation." He loves it and he makes the reader feel at home. Bellow delights in the liveliness, the gallantry of Israeli life: people on the edge of history, an inch from disaster, yet brimming with argument and words. He delights not in tourist delusions but with a tough critical spirit: his Israel is pocked with scars and creases, and all the more attractive for it. Simply as a travel book, the reader finds remarkable descriptions, such as one in which Bellow finds "the melting air" of Jerusalem pressing upon him "with an almost human weight" Something intelligible is communicated by the earthlike colors of this most beautiful of cities. The impression that Bellow offers is that living in Israel must be as exhausting as it is exciting: a murderous barrage on the nerves. Israel, he writes, "is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort." Jerusalem's people are actively and individually involved in universal history. Bellow makes you share in the experience.
Download or read book Henderson the Rain King written by Saul Bellow and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1996-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A middle-age American millionaire goes to Africa in search of a more meaningful life and receives the adoration of an African tribe that believes he has a gift for rainmaking
Download or read book A Political Companion to Saul Bellow written by Gloria L. Cronin and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saul Bellow is one of the twentieth century's most influential, respected, and honored writers. His novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet won the National Book Award, and Humboldt's Gift was awarded the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition, his plays garnered popular and critical acclaim, and some were produced on Broadway. Known for his insights into life in a post-Holocaust world, Bellow's explorations of modernity, Jewish identity, and the relationship between art and society have resonated with his readers, but because his writing is not overtly political, his politics have largely been ignored. A Political Companion to Saul Bellow examines the author's novels, essays, short stories, and letters in order to illuminate his evolution from liberal to neoconservative. It investigates Bellow's exploration of the United States as a democratic system, the religious and ideological influences on his work, and his views on race relations, religious identity, and multiculturalism in the academy. Featuring a fascinating conclusion that draws from interviews with Bellow's sons, this accessible companion is an excellent resource for understanding the political thought of one of America's most acclaimed writers.
Download or read book The Life of Kingsley Amis written by Zachary Leader and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 1010 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit and belligerent fierceness of opinion: Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation–having first achieved prominence with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954 and as one of the Angry Young Men–but also a dominant figure in post—World War II British writing as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist. In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader, acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on unpublished works and correspondence but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken out before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis’s childhood, school days and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. Even as he makes the case for Amis’s cultural centrality–at his death Time magazine claimed that “the British decades between 1955 and 1995 should in fairness be called ‘the Amis era’”–Leader explores the writer’s phobias, self-doubts and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence and personal disaster. Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.
Download or read book Closing of the American Mind written by Allan Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.
