Born in 1915, Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. He would go on to write 18 books of fiction (14 novels, four story collections) which between them would win him the Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt’s Gift, 1975), a record-setting three National Book Awards (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Herzog, Read More
Saul Bellow, celebrated American man of letters who died in 2005, had within him a hard conservative streak that only ripened with age. The apple, then, did not fall far from the tree: Adam Bellow, the son of the novelist who while an editor at HarperCollins assisted with books by the likes of Sarah Palin Read More
Of all the extraordinary items in the selection from Norman Mailer’s correspondence served up in the Oct. 6 issue of The New Yorker, perhaps the most astonishing is the letter Mailer wrote to Don DeLillo in 1988, when Libra (Penguin, $15), Mr. DeLillo’s novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, had just been published. Read More
The cultural critic Lee Siegel is known as something of a terror for his slashing, razor-sharp essays and reviews. His savage eloquence has ticked off a lot of folk, and his not entirely deserved reputation as a hatchet man—news flash: There’s plenty of stuff Lee Siegel likes—has a way of setting people off. In the Read More
In two weeks, Doubleday will ship copies of The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine, a book about Republican corruption and the Jack Abramoff scandal. Doubleday editor-at-large Adam Bellow came up with the idea shortly after the Presidential election in 2004. After selling his boss—William Thomas, the editor in chief Read More
Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin. Schocken Books, 348 pages, $25.
When I entered college, in the mid-1960′s, my freshman class was asked to read two books over the summer: Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King was one of them. In freshman English, along with Read More
One opened The New York Times expectantly, two days after Saul Bellow’s death, ready for the Op-Ed tributes that seemed as certain to appear as The Times itself: Surely one or more of American literature’s surviving phallocrats, a Mailer or a Roth or an Updike, would contribute a brief but feeling essay, hastily composed yet Read More
Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate and dean of Jewish-American fiction, passed away on Tuesday, April 5. He was 89. Bellow, in such novels as Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler’s Planet and, more recently, Ravelstein, examined the persistent anxieties of modern life with a romantic depth and a relentless, if Read More
In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History , by Adam Bellow. Doubleday, 565 pages, $30.
There’s no inheriting a writing gene. When parent and child both write brilliantly it’s a fluke, or else we’d be overrun by Martin Amis types. (Maybe there is a master plan, after all.) Instead of literary dynasties, we get a Read More
In Ravelstein , author Saul Bellow depicts the title character of his latest novel, Abe Ravelstein, as a larger-than-life bon vivant , a man with a “bald powerful head” and “finely made hands.” The publishers of the French edition of Mr. Bellow’s book have envisioned a much different Ravelstein on the cover, however, and at Read More
