General Articles, Chapters, and Reviews

• Abbott, H. Porter. "Saul Bellow and the 'Lost Cause' of Character." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 13 (1980): 264–83.
  

  Establishes the idea that "what is modern about character is neither its trivialization, conversion into words, or other forms of diminishment, but that concern for it would lead to a panel on the topic. . . . character has become a subject." Concentrates largely on DM as a discourse on man in search of his character and unable to find it because he suffers from the "disease" of lucidity and alienation. Provides an in-depth examination of subsequent novels from this perspective.

• Adamowski, T. H. "The Devil in Disguise." University of Toronto Quarterly 65.2 (1996): 452–65.
  

  Discusses Bellow as a young writer moving to New York and joining the mid-century cultural critics associated with the Partisan Review. Discusses what people then thought of Bellow, the promise they saw, his representations of various theoretical positions, where distractions are most likely to occur, Bellow and Heidegger, and finally, attitudes of various writers towards their colleagues.

• Aharoni, Ada. "Bellow and Existentialism." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 42–54. Rpt. in Saul Bellow: The Man and His Works. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Dehli: B. R., Pub., 2000. 151–63.
  

  Argues that a close look at Bellow's novels reveals a profound link between his introspective mode of fiction and modern European existentialism. Sees existentialism not just as a philosophy, but as a shift in ordinary humanattitudes which has altered every aspect of life in our civilization. Traces Bellow's concern with this shift and with the essence of human existence, and sees them as close to those of the existentialists. European existentialism has influenced Bellow's beliefs; his thought is not derivative. Aharoni concludes that Bellow has intelligently absorbed these sources and developed his own introspective mode, thus enriching both American and world literature.

• Aharoni, Ada. "The Cornerstone of Bellow's Art." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 1-12.
  

  Identifies six main elements in all the novels: 1) protagonist in existential crisis, 2) encounter with mentor, 3) confrontation with death or danger, 4) epiphany, 5) environment as a reflection of the character's mind, 6) use of images and symbols as "agents of the introspective process." After a detailed discussion of each of these phases with specific reference to each of the novels, Aharoni ends with a concluding section describing the train journey as the recurrent image of life in the Bellow novel. The journey metaphor, she argues, suggests a pilgrimage via the subway, which has connotations of the human underground of unconscious levels. The Bellow hero, though not the driver, can miss the right stations, or, on occasion, take the right opportunities to alight. Bellow always warns the hero which stop is coming up. Suggests that through using these six cornerstones, Bellow has not only obtained the Nobel Prize, but has "succeeded in reproducing and conveying the most fundamental texture of subjective reality in its most complex inwardness, its ambiguity, its ephemerality, thus giving us one of the deepest, and truest insights into modern man."

• Aharoni, Ada. "Engagement and Responsibility in Saul Bellow's Novels." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992: 35-47.
  

  Argues that Bellow has created a new art form throughout his forty-five years of writing—&—an art form that could be termed engaged introspective fiction. This distinctive Bellovian mode registers the pulse of a responsible modern consciousness confronting contemporary dilemmas, and its fears for humanity and the world. Traces this movement throughout the fiction as the various protagonists find the resources within to heal and make themselves whole as they learn personal responsibility and engagement.

• Aharoni, Ada. "Ha Yesodot ba Omanut ha Sipporet shel Saul Bellow." Galim 1 (1987-88): 11-14.
  
  
• Aharoni, Ada. "Is Saul Bellow's Fiction Radical?" Studies in American Jewish Fiction 14 (1995): 72-79.
  

  Claims that at the base of Bellow's novels is a radical humanism which seems to contribute greatly to giving his fiction its special texture and strength. This is what makes Bellow one of the major literary figures today. His introspective fiction is radical in that it calls for change, stressing that we are not only for the shape and momentum of our own lives, but also for that of our entire civilization and future generations.

• Alexander, Victoria N. "Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov." Antioch Review 52.4 (1994): 580–90.
  

  A comparative study of the respective influences of Bellow and Nabokov on Martin Amis's social doctrines, aesthetic values, and worldview. Includes valuable interview material in which Amis pays tribute to Saul Bellow as a great "moral artist" who has influences both his subject matter and style through such works as the 1977 Jeferson Lectures. Believes Bellow has bequeathed his literary mantle to Amis who, he notes, seems eager to carry on the great tradition. Connects Dean Albert Corde, the socially concerned writer, with the social values of both Amis and Bellow, and concludes that while Bellow is a literal believer in the soul, Amis is an agnostic who believes in Bellovian faith, but finds it lacking in himself.

• Allen, Michael. "Idiomatic Language in Two Novels by Saul Bellow." Journal of American Studies 1.2 (1967): 275–80.
  

  Discusses the language of HRK and AAM. In the former, Henderson's language allows strongly literary phrases to be transformed and energized by the emphatic rhythms of a slang idiom which might be heard anywhere from the Eastern Seaboard to the Midwest. It enables Bellow to characterize Henderson as both Henry Adams and Hemingway in his state of arrested development. Such language also keeps a comic balance between his anguish and his irresponsibility. It also conveys the pathos of his incoherence. Ultimately Bellow's fictions become merely the variegated language of an idiosyncratic individual. What is missing is the backing of an oral tradition such as Twain was able to draw on. In AAM Bellow's use of language is less like Twain's and more like Salinger's in its more limited vitality. All three draw on the tension between an orally transmitted small community language and the language of the printed culture. The function of Augie's Jewish idioms is to heighten, elaborate, and enrich. Commends the effectiveness of Grandma Lausch's language.

• Alter, Robert. "The Stature of Saul Bellow." Midstream 10 (Dec. 1964): 3–15. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow: A Dissent from Modernism" in After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing. Robert Alter. New York: Dutton, 1969. 95–115.
  

  Sees DM and TV not as early examples of alienation fiction, but as distinct from that genre in that they actually subvert it. According to Alter, Bellow's methods here are exploratory and not obtrusively experimental. DM is clearly influenced by Dostoevsky and Proust, though not derivative because the style is informal and less strikingly "modern." Bellow revitalizes pre-revolutionary forms while exploring the awareness and technical resources of the major moderns. He is a master of literary combinations and permutations.

• Alvarez, Carmen Gago. "The Hero and the Social in Saul Be!low's Fiction." Estudios Anglo-Americanos 5–6 (1981–82): 137–44. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1983.
  
  
• Alves, Teresa F. A. "In Praise of Saul's Soul." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 32– 43.
  

  A reminiscence on first reading Saul Bellow in the 1960s, and then rereading him back in Portugal after a sojourn in the U.S. Reviews several of the novels, AAM in particular, and their visionary historical reflections on the motif of movement and travel within the American experience—and that of the American artist in particular.

• Anders, Jaroslaw. "Saul Bellow's Treatment of Ideas in Three Major Works." Kwartalnic Neofilologiczny 27.4 (1980): 455–66.
  

  Examines H, MSP and HG in an effort to determine the place ideas take in the novelistic structure, along with their relation to the general thematic outlines of the novels. Concludes that their final effect is a total change of vision on the part of the protagonists and their eventual silencing as a "contemplative repose."

• Anderson, David D. "Chicago as Metaphor." Great Lakes Review 1.1 (1974): 3–15.
  

  Traces Chicago as a metaphor in the works of several writers from Sherwood Anderson to Saul Bellow. Deals briefly with AAM.

• Anderson, David D. "Saul Bellow and the Midwestern Myth of the Search." Midwestern Miscellany 22 (1994): 46–53.
  

  Argues that the recurring motif in Bellow's fiction is the predicament of the adult male caught up in the unfolding history of his time, yet temporarily suspended between competing realities. He contemplates the changing nature of his life as it relates to the changing nature of the city, the nation, and the world around him. However, there is a degree of denial in his admissions of literary influence that is both American and Midwestern—part of a social, political, cultural, and literary complex that was Chicago in the 1920s stemming from Twain, Dreiser, Sandburg, Masters, and Anderson. Elaborates this milieu and its influence on the emergent Bellow. Argues that Bellow's cases of the Midwestern myth of self embodied in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are equally important. All Bellow's characters have an intrinsic faith in the search as does Huck Finn, in the fulfillment of the eighteenth century American promise in the nineteenth and twentieth century American reality. All his chapters come to the conclusion that if the search has an end, that end is beyond either the comprehension or the grasp of those that seek it, that it has no endings, just continuations.

• Anderson, David D. "Saul Bellow and the Noble Savage: An Anticipatory Review." Midwestern Miscellany 27 (1999): 47–53.
  

  Identifies the trope of the dangling man still at work in Bellow's recent excerpt in the New Yorker. Traces the literary journey of the dangling man, caught between two competing solitudes, two identities, two cultures, two dreams, and a multitude of apparent choices when in reality there are none. Sees the now 84 year-old Bellow as still searching for ths stability and unity from his earliest boyhood associations, through all his reading, and on into his friendship with the late Allan Bloom. Argues that each dangling man esists corruption in a corrupt age, and seeks insight, revelation, and truth. Concludes that with Ravelstein, who in his old age has a heightened Augie March-like sensitivity to the ongoing farce of the type he enjoys, Bellow has an orchestra seat. He is another of Bellow's Noble Savages.

• Anderson, David D. "'Starting Out in Chicago': Saul Bellow's Literary Apprenticeship." Midwestern Miscellany 21 (1993): 44–56.
  

  Sketches the history of Bellow's development as a writer from his emergence as a Midwesterner who, starting out in Chicago, read not only Talmud in the public library, but Anderson, Dreiser, Masters, and Lindsay as well. Recounts Bellow's experience of manufacturing, banking, shipping, slums, prisons, and hospitals in Chicago, and recalls as his predecessor in the invention of Midwestern mythos—Mark Twain. Discusses the influence on the young Bellow of Tuley High School and his friends Dave Peltz, Sam Friedfeld, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Oscar Tarkov, and their adherence to the Trotskyite movement, his subsequent study of anthropology at Northwestern, his early teaching career, the Illinois WPA, the work at the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and the Great Books project and so forth. Traces some of the theories in Bellow's earliest short stories to such Midwestern masterpieces as Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, and Sister Carrie which show restless journeying from place to place, neighborhoods and townscapes. Concludes that in this early phase, the Midwest had been peopled and given substance in the literature of Chicago, the Midwest, and the American mainstream.

• Astruc, Remi. "'L'Identite paradoxale': Modalities de l'exploration dans le oevres de Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Woody Allen." Explorations et frontieres aux Etats-Unis: Histoire, anthropologie, litterature. Eds. Francois Brunet et Catherine Lejeune. Cahiers Charles V, Paris, France (CCV), 25. Paris: Institut d'Etudes Anglophones, U Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1998. 129–41. [In French]
  
  
• Atlas, James. "The Biographer and the Murderer." New York Times Magazine 12 Dec. 1993: 74–75.
  

  Within a general discussion on the contemporary ethical issues involved in writing biography, Atlas discusses only incidentally Saul Bellow's officially changing his name on his twenty-first birthday, and how many of his early characters also changed theirs. He poses the question of what the biographer might legitimately make of this, along with many other ethical questions which currently beset the biographer.

• Atlas, Marilyn Judith. "The Figurine in the China Cabinet: Saul Bellow and the Nobel Prize." MidAmeria 8 (1981): 36–49.
  

  Describes Bellow's mixed responses to winning the Nobel Prize in 1976. Comments on the judges' reasons for the award in terms of Bellow's ability to create character and critique contemporary culture. Summarizes Beilow's printed responses, Richard Stern's NYT essay and all of Bellow's previous awards. Documents Bellow's defensiveness after receiving the award and his refusal to become a cultural "functionary." Analyzes the content of Bellow's Nobel Lecture in terms of his focus on the individual life, his identification with Conrad as a displaced person, and his artistic faith in character. Discusses the chief protagonists briefly and in chronological order in terms of their dimensions as "characters."

• Axthelm, Peter M. "The Full Perception: Bellow." The Modern Confessional Novel. Peter M. Axthelm. Yale College Series 6. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967. 128–77.
  
  
• Ayyar, Poppy. "The Changing Character of the Jew in American Ficiton." Asian Response to American Literature. Ed. C. D. Narasimaiah. New York: Barnes, 1972. 293–98.
  
  
• Abbott, H. Porter. "Saul Bellow and the 'Lost Cause' of Character." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 13 (1980): 264–83.
  

  Establishes the idea that "what is modern about character is neither its trivialization, conversion into words, or other forms of diminishment, but that concern for it would lead to a panel on the topic. . . . character has become a subject." Concentrates largely on DM

• as a discourse on man in search of his character and unable to find it because he suffers from the "disease" of lucidity and alienation. Provides an in-depth examination of subsequent novels from this perspective.
  
  
• Adamowski, T. H. "The Devil in Disguise." University of Toronto Quarterly 65.2 (1996): 452–65.
  

  Discusses Bellow as a young writer moving to New York and joining the mid-century cultural critics associated with the Partisan Review. Discusses what people then thought of Bellow, the promise they saw, his representations of various theoretical positions, where distractions are most likely to occur, Bellow and Heidegger, and finally, attitudes of various writers towards their colleagues.

• Aharoni, Ada. "Bellow and Existentialism." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 42–54. Rpt. in Saul Bellow: The Man and His Works. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Dehli: B. R., Pub., 2000. 151–63.
  

  Argues that a close look at Bellow's novels reveals a profound link between his introspective mode of fiction and modern European existentialism. Sees existentialism not just as a philosophy, but as a shift in ordinary humanattitudes which has altered every aspect of life in our civilization. Traces Bellow's concern with this shift and with the essence of human existence, and sees them as close to those of the existentialists. European existentialism has influenced Bellow's beliefs; his thought is not derivative. Aharoni concludes that Bellow has intelligently absorbed these sources and developed his own introspective mode, thus enriching both American and world literature.

• Aharoni, Ada. "The Cornerstone of Bellow's Art." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 1-12.
  

  Identifies six main elements in all the novels: 1) protagonist in existential crisis, 2) encounter with mentor, 3) confrontation with death or danger, 4) epiphany, 5) environment as a reflection of the character's mind, 6) use of images and symbols as "agents of the introspective process." After a detailed discussion of each of these phases with specific reference to each of the novels, Aharoni ends with a concluding section describing the train journey as the recurrent image of life in the Bellow novel. The journey metaphor, she argues, suggests a pilgrimage via the subway, which has connotations of the human underground of unconscious levels. The Bellow hero, though not the driver, can miss the right stations, or, on occasion, take the right opportunities to alight. Bellow always warns the hero which stop is coming up. Suggests that through using these six cornerstones, Bellow has not only obtained the Nobel Prize, but has "succeeded in reproducing and conveying the most fundamental texture of subjective reality in its most complex inwardness, its ambiguity, its ephemerality, thus giving us one of the deepest, and truest insights into modern man."

• Aharoni, Ada. "Engagement and Responsibility in Saul Bellow's Novels." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992: 35-47.
  

  Argues that Bellow has created a new art form throughout his forty-five years of writing—&—an art form that could be termed engaged introspective fiction. This distinctive Bellovian mode registers the pulse of a responsible modern consciousness confronting contemporary dilemmas, and its fears for humanity and the world. Traces this movement throughout the fiction as the various protagonists find the resources within to heal and make themselves whole as they learn personal responsibility and engagement.

• Aharoni, Ada. "Ha Yesodot ba Omanut ha Sipporet shel Saul Bellow." Galim 1 (1987-88): 11-14.
  
  
• Aharoni, Ada. "Is Saul Bellow's Fiction Radical?" Studies in American Jewish Fiction 14 (1995): 72-79.
  

  Claims that at the base of Bellow's novels is a radical humanism which seems to contribute greatly to giving his fiction its special texture and strength. This is what makes Bellow one of the major literary figures today. His introspective fiction is radical in that it calls for change, stressing that we are not only for the shape and momentum of our own lives, but also for that of our entire civilization and future generations.

• Alexander, Victoria N. "Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov." Antioch Review 52.4 (1994): 580–90.
  

  A comparative study of the respective influences of Bellow and Nabokov on Martin Amis's social doctrines, aesthetic values, and worldview. Includes valuable interview material in which Amis pays tribute to Saul Bellow as a great "moral artist" who has influences both his subject matter and style through such works as the 1977 Jeferson Lectures. Believes Bellow has bequeathed his literary mantle to Amis who, he notes, seems eager to carry on the great tradition. Connects Dean Albert Corde, the socially concerned writer, with the social values of both Amis and Bellow, and concludes that while Bellow is a literal believer in the soul, Amis is an agnostic who believes in Bellovian faith, but finds it lacking in himself.

• Allen, Michael. "Idiomatic Language in Two Novels by Saul Bellow." Journal of American Studies 1.2 (1967): 275–80.
  

  Discusses the language of HRK and AAM. In the former, Henderson's language allows strongly literary phrases to be transformed and energized by the emphatic rhythms of a slang idiom which might be heard anywhere from the Eastern Seaboard to the Midwest. It enables Bellow to characterize Henderson as both Henry Adams and Hemingway in his state of arrested development. Such language also keeps a comic balance between his anguish and his irresponsibility. It also conveys the pathos of his incoherence. Ultimately Bellow's fictions become merely the variegated language of an idiosyncratic individual. What is missing is the backing of an oral tradition such as Twain was able to draw on. In AAM Bellow's use of language is less like Twain's and more like Salinger's in its more limited vitality. All three draw on the tension between an orally transmitted small community language and the language of the printed culture. The function of Augie's Jewish idioms is to heighten, elaborate, and enrich. Commends the effectiveness of Grandma Lausch's language.

• Alter, Robert. "The Stature of Saul Bellow." Midstream 10 (Dec. 1964): 3–15. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow: A Dissent from Modernism" in After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing. Robert Alter. New York: Dutton, 1969. 95–115.
  

  Sees DM and TV not as early examples of alienation fiction, but as distinct from that genre in that they actually subvert it. According to Alter, Bellow's methods here are exploratory and not obtrusively experimental. DM is clearly influenced by Dostoevsky and Proust, though not derivative because the style is informal and less strikingly "modern." Bellow revitalizes pre-revolutionary forms while exploring the awareness and technical resources of the major moderns. He is a master of literary combinations and permutations.

• Alvarez, Carmen Gago. "The Hero and the Social in Saul Be!low's Fiction." Estudios Anglo-Americanos 5–6 (1981–82): 137–44. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1983.
  
  
• Alves, Teresa F. A. "In Praise of Saul's Soul." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 32– 43.
  

  A reminiscence on first reading Saul Bellow in the 1960s, and then rereading him back in Portugal after a sojourn in the U.S. Reviews several of the novels, AAM in particular, and their visionary historical reflections on the motif of movement and travel within the American experience—and that of the American artist in particular.

• Anders, Jaroslaw. "Saul Bellow's Treatment of Ideas in Three Major Works." Kwartalnic Neofilologiczny 27.4 (1980): 455–66.
  

  Examines H, MSP and HG in an effort to determine the place ideas take in the novelistic structure, along with their relation to the general thematic outlines of the novels. Concludes that their final effect is a total change of vision on the part of the protagonists and their eventual silencing as a "contemplative repose."

• Anderson, David D. "Chicago as Metaphor." Great Lakes Review 1.1 (1974): 3–15.
  

  Traces Chicago as a metaphor in the works of several writers from Sherwood Anderson to Saul Bellow. Deals briefly with AAM.

• Anderson, David D. "Saul Bellow and the Midwestern Myth of the Search." Midwestern Miscellany 22 (1994): 46–53.
  

  Argues that the recurring motif in Bellow's fiction is the predicament of the adult male caught up in the unfolding history of his time, yet temporarily suspended between competing realities. He contemplates the changing nature of his life as it relates to the changing nature of the city, the nation, and the world around him. However, there is a degree of denial in his admissions of literary influence that is both American and Midwestern—part of a social, political, cultural, and literary complex that was Chicago in the 1920s stemming from Twain, Dreiser, Sandburg, Masters, and Anderson. Elaborates this milieu and its influence on the emergent Bellow. Argues that Bellow's cases of the Midwestern myth of self embodied in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are equally important. All Bellow's characters have an intrinsic faith in the search as does Huck Finn, in the fulfillment of the eighteenth century American promise in the nineteenth and twentieth century American reality. All his chapters come to the conclusion that if the search has an end, that end is beyond either the comprehension or the grasp of those that seek it, that it has no endings, just continuations.

• Anderson, David D. "Saul Bellow and the Noble Savage: An Anticipatory Review." Midwestern Miscellany 27 (1999): 47–53.
  

  Identifies the trope of the dangling man still at work in Bellow's recent excerpt in the New Yorker. Traces the literary journey of the dangling man, caught between two competing solitudes, two identities, two cultures, two dreams, and a multitude of apparent choices when in reality there are none. Sees the now 84 year-old Bellow as still searching for ths stability and unity from his earliest boyhood associations, through all his reading, and on into his friendship with the late Allan Bloom. Argues that each dangling man esists corruption in a corrupt age, and seeks insight, revelation, and truth. Concludes that with Ravelstein, who in his old age has a heightened Augie March-like sensitivity to the ongoing farce of the type he enjoys, Bellow has an orchestra seat. He is another of Bellow's Noble Savages.

• Anderson, David D. "'Starting Out in Chicago': Saul Bellow's Literary Apprenticeship." Midwestern Miscellany 21 (1993): 44–56.
  

  Sketches the history of Bellow's development as a writer from his emergence as a Midwesterner who, starting out in Chicago, read not only Talmud in the public library, but Anderson, Dreiser, Masters, and Lindsay as well. Recounts Bellow's experience of manufacturing, banking, shipping, slums, prisons, and hospitals in Chicago, and recalls as his predecessor in the invention of Midwestern mythos—Mark Twain. Discusses the influence on the young Bellow of Tuley High School and his friends Dave Peltz, Sam Friedfeld, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Oscar Tarkov, and their adherence to the Trotskyite movement, his subsequent study of anthropology at Northwestern, his early teaching career, the Illinois WPA, the work at the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and the Great Books project and so forth. Traces some of the theories in Bellow's earliest short stories to such Midwestern masterpieces as Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, and Sister Carrie which show restless journeying from place to place, neighborhoods and townscapes. Concludes that in this early phase, the Midwest had been peopled and given substance in the literature of Chicago, the Midwest, and the American mainstream.

• Astruc, Remi. "'L'Identite paradoxale': Modalities de l'exploration dans le oevres de Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Woody Allen." Explorations et frontieres aux Etats-Unis: Histoire, anthropologie, litterature. Eds. Francois Brunet et Catherine Lejeune. Cahiers Charles V, Paris, France (CCV), 25. Paris: Institut d'Etudes Anglophones, U Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1998. 129–41. [In French]
  
  
• Atlas, James. "The Biographer and the Murderer." New York Times Magazine 12 Dec. 1993: 74–75.
  

  Within a general discussion on the contemporary ethical issues involved in writing biography, Atlas discusses only incidentally Saul Bellow's officially changing his name on his twenty-first birthday, and how many of his early characters also changed theirs. He poses the question of what the biographer might legitimately make of this, along with many other ethical questions which currently beset the biographer.

• Atlas, Marilyn Judith. "The Figurine in the China Cabinet: Saul Bellow and the Nobel Prize." MidAmeria 8 (1981): 36–49.
  

  Describes Bellow's mixed responses to winning the Nobel Prize in 1976. Comments on the judges' reasons for the award in terms of Bellow's ability to create character and critique contemporary culture. Summarizes Beilow's printed responses, Richard Stern's NYT essay and all of Bellow's previous awards. Documents Bellow's defensiveness after receiving the award and his refusal to become a cultural "functionary." Analyzes the content of Bellow's Nobel Lecture in terms of his focus on the individual life, his identification with Conrad as a displaced person, and his artistic faith in character. Discusses the chief protagonists briefly and in chronological order in terms of their dimensions as "characters."

• Axthelm, Peter M. "The Full Perception: Bellow." The Modern Confessional Novel. Peter M. Axthelm. Yale College Series 6. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967. 128–77.
  
  
• Ayyar, Poppy. "The Changing Character of the Jew in American Ficiton." Asian Response to American Literature. Ed. C. D. Narasimaiah. New York: Barnes, 1972. 293–98.
  
  

• Calin, Vera. "Ignorarea psihologiei" [ "The Ignoring of Psychology'']. Omisiunea elocventa [The Eloquent Omission] Bucharest: Editura enciclopedica romana, 1973. 243–46.
  
  
• Carter, Everett. "Optimism in the Twentieth Century: Saul Bellow." The American Idea: The Literary Response to American Optimism. Everett Carter. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1977. 249–54.
  

  Places Bellow in the wake of Henry Adams and James. Deals with his philosophical affirmations in brief summary.

• Cawelti, John G. "De Verontruste Academici van Saul Bellow." De Universiteit in Opsraak: de Universiteitsroman in de Anglo-Amerikaanse en Europese Lituratuur. Ed. Annie van den Oever. Baarn: De Prom, 1991.
  
  
• Chabot, C. Barry. "The Thirties and the Failure of the Future." Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism. C. Barry Chabot. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 1997. 205–46.
  

  Discusses the regional, agrarian, and proletarian impulses in the Depression era. Argues that there is a similarity in the literary work produced by leftist writers which in some ways resembles that written by participants in the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance. Then describes the first existentialist novels of the 1930s, including DM and AAM (1953), as dispirited about the collapse of proletarian fiction, the Left, radical politics, and the status quo. Argues that these novels represent that early moment in Bellow's career in which he had set aside one vision of social life and not yet adapted another. As a result terms such as "life," "death," and "freedom" possess little positive substance, despite the fact that Joseph and Augie try in vain to rub some saving vision from their too smooth surfaces.

• Chametzky, Jules. "Notes on the Assimilation of the American-Jewish Writer: Abraham Cahan to Saul Bellow." Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien 9 (1964): 173–80.
  

  Outlines very briefly the history of American-Jewish writers, mentioning Bellow at the end of the article. Mainly useful for historical perspective.

• Chametzky, Jules. Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Meditations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers. U of Massachusetts P, 1986. 51–53, 64–65, passim.
  

  In Chapter Two, "The Assimilation of the American Jewish Writer: Abraham Cahan to Saul Bellow," Bellow is described as one of America's intellegentsia who celebrates the American experience in introspective parables like DM and TV. Writes that Bellow has been chiefly influenced by Dostoyevsky. Places AAM within this tradition. In Chapter Three, "Immigrant Fiction as Cultural Meditation," AAM is once more treated, though very briefly.

• Chapman, Abraham. "The Image of Man as Portrayed by Saul Bellow." College Language Association Journal 10 (1967): 285–98.
  

  Discusses Bellow's first six novels and novella from the point of view of the Odyssean search for self. Illustrates the thesis that "Man Searching is very close to Man Lost, but equally close to Man Found."

• Chavkin, Allan. "Bellow and English Romanticism." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 7–18. Rpt in The New Romanticism: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Eberhard Alsen Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2188. New York. Garland, 2000. 113–26.
  

  Traces the immense debt to English (and American) Romanticism found throughout the Bellow novels. This is a detailed and erudite analysis. Concludes that the soaring spirit is never far from the "clamoring world." A major article.

• Chavkin, Allan. "Father and Sons: 'Papa' Hemingway and Saul Bellow." Papers on Language and Literature 19.4 (1983): 449–60.
  

  Bellow's literary relationship with Hemingway, Chavkin claims, was compounded of defensiveness, envy, love and hate. Often he distorted the work of his literary forefather. Chavkin goes on to examine the critique of Hemingway in Bellow's novels. Discusses also the father/son relationship in the novels in light of the father/son relationship between Bellow and Hemingway. In the course of this relationship, Bellow ultimately rejects Hemingway's fatalistic view of the universe. Both writers grapple with the same problems, but when they differ the comparison between the two is useful because each illuminates the other.

• Chavkin, Allan. "The Middle and Later Fiction of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1991): 72–75.
  
  
• Chavkin, Allan. "The Problem of Suffering in the Fiction of Saul Bellow." Comparative Literature Studies 21.2 (1984): 161–74.
  

  Rejects Clayton's thesis of Jewish guilt, and pathological social masochism as being simplistic. Argues that Bellow's very sophisticated view of suffering derives from Dostoev-skian humanism, English romanticism, Jewish comedy and anti-modernism—or rather, Bellow's interpretation of these traditions. Provides an overview of the canon from this perspective. A major article.

• Chavkin, Allan and Nancy Feyl Chavkin.. "Saul Bellow's Martyrs and Moralists: The Role of the Writer in Modem Society." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 13–24.
  
  
• Christhiif, Mark M. "Death and Deliverance in Saul Bellow's Symbolic City." Ball State University Forum 18.2 (1977): 9–23.
  

  Argues that, with the exception of HRK, the cityscapes in the Bellow novel function as an inferno which threatens man's sanity and dignity at each turn. But in addition, Bellow's fictional city also has mythic, apocalyptic overtones. In the later works the city, in terms of the physical imagery used to embody it, undergoes a transformation from a concrete narrative setting to a higher abstract place. Utilizing various novelistic forms and techniques, Bellow has dramatized the city as an extension of the evil potential within man, a theme he conveys throughout his works.

• Christhilf, Mark M. "Saul Bellow and the American Intellectual Community." Modern Age 28.1 (1984): 55–67.
  

  Argues that a critique of the American intellectual community informs all of Bellow's work. Discusses his estrangment from this community. Discusses the middle and later novels in detail. Concludes with an estimate of Bellow's influence in this intellectual community.

• Chyet, Stanley F. "Three Generations: An Account of American Jewish Fictions (1896–1969)." Jewish Social Studies 34.1 (1972): 31–41.
  

  In the section subtitled, "The Third Generation," there are some brief references to Bellow, Roth, and Malamud. Considers all three to be Freudians who are unwilling to view the world through ideological lenses. Their mysticism is quite non-messianic and they are very willing to historicize their characters. They testify to the demoralization of the Angle Saxon nativism.

• Clayton, John J. "Alienation and Masochism." Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. John J. Clayton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1968. 2nd ed. 1979. 49–76. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 65–85.
  

  Discusses the paradox of Bellow's personal despair and romantic idealism, not to mention his Jewish humanism and Jewish guilt and self-hatred. Details evidences of Bellow's personal despair creeping into his fiction. Concludes that Bellow, like his heroes, is "life-affirming, love-affirming, individual-affirming. But underneath the 'yea' is a deep, persuasive 'nay'—underneath belief in the individual and in the possibility of community is alienation, masochism, despair."

• Clayton, John J. "The Unity and Development of Bellow's Fiction." Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. John J. Clayton. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. 2nd ed. 1979. 287–310. Rpt. in Der Amerikanische Roman Nach 1945. Wege der Forschung 639. Ed. Arno Heller. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. 364–84.
  
  
• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "The Comedy of Urban Low Life: From Saul Bellow to Mordecai Richler." Thalia 4.2 (1981–82): 21–24.
  

  Cohen examines the fascination of the Bellow hero with low-life Chicago types like Cantabile and shows how both characters are determined to profit instantly from their association with each other. The humor arises with the sudden shifting of planes up or down and the undercutting of intellectual pretension by bodily needs. However, as in the dynamics of conventional comedy, that which is deviant and threatening is ultimately banished and conservative norms of social order restored. Cohen compares and contrasts the humor of both Richler and Bellow and concludes that the prudish intellectual Bellow produces humor that is neither as truculent nor as ill-mannered as that of the less accepted Richler.

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Saul Bellow's Chicago." Modern Fiction Studies 24.1 (1978): 139–46.
  

  Describes briefly the effects of Chicago on all who encountered it, then traces Bellow's very important stylistic and thematic use of it in his fiction.

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher." Saul Bellow's Chicago Humor." Saul Bellow Journal 6.1 (1987): 9–17.
  

  Argues that "one of the benefits we as readers gain from Bellow's exposure to Chicago's backwardness is the sense of comedy he derives from juxtaposing within its midst the earthy and erudite, the boorish and the genteel, the criminal and the upright. Through sudden shifts, both upward and downward, from one level of association to the next he amuses us with his daredevil cultural leaps and chameleon changes of narrative voice."

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Sex: Saul Bellow's Hedonistic Joke." Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 223–29. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 175–80.
  

  Details Bellow's treatment of sex as a laughable preoccupation in which the hero "experiences some difficulty in learning the rules and familiarizing himself with the other players' techniques." Sex in the Bellow novel is depicted primarily as a game. Usually the hero feels duped into thinking that through sex he has fused with another person.

• Coren, Alan. "Displaced Persons." Punch 19 Oct. 1966: 603.
  

  Characterizes the funadmental condition of the Bellow hero as general anxiety-ridden, and complains that none of the novels provide any action. Comments on the Hewish component of such angst and concludes that what is turly universal about these works is their disorientation, insecurity, suspicion, and general twentieth-century malaise.

• Corner, Martin. "Humanity and the Everyday: Creatureliness and Textuality in Saul Bellow and John Updike." Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies [Debrecen, Hungary] 1 (1996): 123-32.
  

  Explores the immersion in the quotidian, the" rootedness" of human living examined within the novels of both Updike and Bellow. Suggests that both writers ask what to make of life, whether one should search for some transcendent or direct love, and their veneration of the "givenness" that surrounds us. Shows how Bellow links this issue to the problem of "creatureliness" in AAM and how both writers share Heidegger's sense of human life as being" thrown into givenness" and creatureliness in the face of death. For each of them this question extends into the more specific question of the textuality of the subject. Bellow describes a givenness that is not mere contingency, but a structure which shapes the quotidian. Concludes, however, that there is also a human firmness in his fiction which tends to lift creatureliness out of subjection to circumstance into human dignity.

• Corner, Martin. "Moving Outwards: Consciousness, Discourse and Attention in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Studies in the Novel 32.3 (2000): 369-85.
  

  Describes the tendency of Bellow critics to see his fiction as an inward journey from outer to inner truth, from the confusions of discourse to the truth of the heart. Argues instead that Bellow is that kind of romantic who is a devotee of inclusion, brotherhood, and community. Hence Bellow's heroes engage in the important journey from the separateness of individual life to the morally sustaining connectedness of a shared community of ethical mutuality. In his mature fiction, Bellow offers a pathology of average twentieth-century consciousness as it is formed in discourse, and in a rooting of moral action in the pre-ethical category of attention. Between Herzog and Sammler, they compose a history of the ethical, which begins with a recognition of how average discursive consciousness defeats the moral, and continues through a painful, and not fully resolved, account of the conditions of moral awareness and human interconnection. Provides a detailed explication of this movement away from the self.

• Corner, Martin. "The Patriarchal Blessing: Saul Bellow's Narratives of Childhood." Studies in American Jewish Literature 19 (2000): 16–25.
  

  Describes the extent to which Bellow's fiction rehearses stories and episodes from his childhood. Argues that these are not simply nostalgic interludes, regressions to remote familiarity, or the gravitational center of the fiction. Posits instead that while they contain some of the most memorable moments of his fiction, they seem to belong to a different imaginative world than the rest of his writing, being much more direct and unmediated. They offer an approach to what, for many readers, has been the main problem with Bellow's fiction, that he is given to excessive intellectualization and is unable to create situations of compelling life. He seems to understand with Levinas that though we have no choice but to live within the thematized and the discursive world, our final responsibility is to that which discourse cannot contain. Bellow's fiction resists the conclusion that the novel cannot reach beyond discourse to what discourse cannot contain. Examines Bellow's Napoleon Street section from H and "By the St. Lawrence" as deformations of the form of the Patriarchal Blessing with its curses and blessings.

• Cowley, Malcolm. "The Literary Situation, 1965." University of Mississippi Studies in English 6 (1965): 91–98.
  

  While answering questions at a literary conference, Cowley comments that though Bellow lacks the brilliance of some of the other writers of the period, he makes up for that with his tremendous integrity. Cowley also comments that each new book constitutes a fresh start.

• Cronin, Gloria L "Holy War against the Moderns: Saul Bellow's Antimodernist Critique of Contemporary American Society." Studies in American ]ewish Literature 8.1 (1989): 77–94.
  

  Argues that Bellow's lifelong determination has been to deflect the main course of modernist thinking, which has dominated Western culture and American thought in our century. Traces throughout his interviews, essays, and fiction Bellow's consistent attempts to scorn absurdism, alienation ethics, historicist pessimism, the diminishment of the private self, and the belief in Deus Abscondus. Covers all of the novels up to MDH. Concludes that, as the great metaphysical comedian of contemporary letters, Bellow has quarreled power fully with all the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers and waged a forty-year long holy war in an attempt to rescue contemporary ideas of the Self.

• Calin, Vera. "Ignorarea psihologiei" [ "The Ignoring of Psychology'']. Omisiunea elocventa [The Eloquent Omission] Bucharest: Editura enciclopedica romana, 1973. 243–46.
  
  
• Carter, Everett. "Optimism in the Twentieth Century: Saul Bellow." The American Idea: The Literary Response to American Optimism. Everett Carter. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1977. 249–54.
  

  Places Bellow in the wake of Henry Adams and James. Deals with his philosophical affirmations in brief summary.

• Cawelti, John G. "De Verontruste Academici van Saul Bellow." De Universiteit in Opsraak: de Universiteitsroman in de Anglo-Amerikaanse en Europese Lituratuur. Ed. Annie van den Oever. Baarn: De Prom, 1991.
  
  
• Chabot, C. Barry. "The Thirties and the Failure of the Future." Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism. C. Barry Chabot. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 1997. 205–46.
  

  Discusses the regional, agrarian, and proletarian impulses in the Depression era. Argues that there is a similarity in the literary work produced by leftist writers which in some ways resembles that written by participants in the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance. Then describes the first existentialist novels of the 1930s, including DM and AAM (1953), as dispirited about the collapse of proletarian fiction, the Left, radical politics, and the status quo. Argues that these novels represent that early moment in Bellow's career in which he had set aside one vision of social life and not yet adapted another. As a result terms such as "life," "death," and "freedom" possess little positive substance, despite the fact that Joseph and Augie try in vain to rub some saving vision from their too smooth surfaces.

• Chametzky, Jules. "Notes on the Assimilation of the American-Jewish Writer: Abraham Cahan to Saul Bellow." Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien 9 (1964): 173–80.
  

  Outlines very briefly the history of American-Jewish writers, mentioning Bellow at the end of the article. Mainly useful for historical perspective.

• Chametzky, Jules. Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Meditations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers. U of Massachusetts P, 1986. 51–53, 64–65, passim.
  

  In Chapter Two, "The Assimilation of the American Jewish Writer: Abraham Cahan to Saul Bellow," Bellow is described as one of America's intellegentsia who celebrates the American experience in introspective parables like DM and TV. Writes that Bellow has been chiefly influenced by Dostoyevsky. Places AAM within this tradition. In Chapter Three, "Immigrant Fiction as Cultural Meditation," AAM is once more treated, though very briefly.

• Chapman, Abraham. "The Image of Man as Portrayed by Saul Bellow." College Language Association Journal 10 (1967): 285–98.
  

  Discusses Bellow's first six novels and novella from the point of view of the Odyssean search for self. Illustrates the thesis that "Man Searching is very close to Man Lost, but equally close to Man Found."

• Chavkin, Allan. "Bellow and English Romanticism." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 7–18. Rpt in The New Romanticism: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Eberhard Alsen Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2188. New York. Garland, 2000. 113–26.
  

  Traces the immense debt to English (and American) Romanticism found throughout the Bellow novels. This is a detailed and erudite analysis. Concludes that the soaring spirit is never far from the "clamoring world." A major article.

• Chavkin, Allan. "Father and Sons: 'Papa' Hemingway and Saul Bellow." Papers on Language and Literature 19.4 (1983): 449–60.
  

  Bellow's literary relationship with Hemingway, Chavkin claims, was compounded of defensiveness, envy, love and hate. Often he distorted the work of his literary forefather. Chavkin goes on to examine the critique of Hemingway in Bellow's novels. Discusses also the father/son relationship in the novels in light of the father/son relationship between Bellow and Hemingway. In the course of this relationship, Bellow ultimately rejects Hemingway's fatalistic view of the universe. Both writers grapple with the same problems, but when they differ the comparison between the two is useful because each illuminates the other.

• Chavkin, Allan. "The Middle and Later Fiction of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1991): 72–75.
  
  
• Chavkin, Allan. "The Problem of Suffering in the Fiction of Saul Bellow." Comparative Literature Studies 21.2 (1984): 161–74.
  

  Rejects Clayton's thesis of Jewish guilt, and pathological social masochism as being simplistic. Argues that Bellow's very sophisticated view of suffering derives from Dostoev-skian humanism, English romanticism, Jewish comedy and anti-modernism—or rather, Bellow's interpretation of these traditions. Provides an overview of the canon from this perspective. A major article.

• Chavkin, Allan and Nancy Feyl Chavkin.. "Saul Bellow's Martyrs and Moralists: The Role of the Writer in Modem Society." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 13–24.
  
  
• Christhiif, Mark M. "Death and Deliverance in Saul Bellow's Symbolic City." Ball State University Forum 18.2 (1977): 9–23.
  

  Argues that, with the exception of HRK, the cityscapes in the Bellow novel function as an inferno which threatens man's sanity and dignity at each turn. But in addition, Bellow's fictional city also has mythic, apocalyptic overtones. In the later works the city, in terms of the physical imagery used to embody it, undergoes a transformation from a concrete narrative setting to a higher abstract place. Utilizing various novelistic forms and techniques, Bellow has dramatized the city as an extension of the evil potential within man, a theme he conveys throughout his works.

• Christhilf, Mark M. "Saul Bellow and the American Intellectual Community." Modern Age 28.1 (1984): 55–67.
  

  Argues that a critique of the American intellectual community informs all of Bellow's work. Discusses his estrangment from this community. Discusses the middle and later novels in detail. Concludes with an estimate of Bellow's influence in this intellectual community.

• Chyet, Stanley F. "Three Generations: An Account of American Jewish Fictions (1896–1969)." Jewish Social Studies 34.1 (1972): 31–41.
  

  In the section subtitled, "The Third Generation," there are some brief references to Bellow, Roth, and Malamud. Considers all three to be Freudians who are unwilling to view the world through ideological lenses. Their mysticism is quite non-messianic and they are very willing to historicize their characters. They testify to the demoralization of the Angle Saxon nativism.

• Clayton, John J. "Alienation and Masochism." Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. John J. Clayton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1968. 2nd ed. 1979. 49–76. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 65–85.
  

  Discusses the paradox of Bellow's personal despair and romantic idealism, not to mention his Jewish humanism and Jewish guilt and self-hatred. Details evidences of Bellow's personal despair creeping into his fiction. Concludes that Bellow, like his heroes, is "life-affirming, love-affirming, individual-affirming. But underneath the 'yea' is a deep, persuasive 'nay'—underneath belief in the individual and in the possibility of community is alienation, masochism, despair."

• Clayton, John J. "The Unity and Development of Bellow's Fiction." Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. John J. Clayton. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. 2nd ed. 1979. 287–310. Rpt. in Der Amerikanische Roman Nach 1945. Wege der Forschung 639. Ed. Arno Heller. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. 364–84.
  
  
• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "The Comedy of Urban Low Life: From Saul Bellow to Mordecai Richler." Thalia 4.2 (1981–82): 21–24.
  

  Cohen examines the fascination of the Bellow hero with low-life Chicago types like Cantabile and shows how both characters are determined to profit instantly from their association with each other. The humor arises with the sudden shifting of planes up or down and the undercutting of intellectual pretension by bodily needs. However, as in the dynamics of conventional comedy, that which is deviant and threatening is ultimately banished and conservative norms of social order restored. Cohen compares and contrasts the humor of both Richler and Bellow and concludes that the prudish intellectual Bellow produces humor that is neither as truculent nor as ill-mannered as that of the less accepted Richler.

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Saul Bellow's Chicago." Modern Fiction Studies 24.1 (1978): 139–46.
  

  Describes briefly the effects of Chicago on all who encountered it, then traces Bellow's very important stylistic and thematic use of it in his fiction.

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher." Saul Bellow's Chicago Humor." Saul Bellow Journal 6.1 (1987): 9–17.
  

  Argues that "one of the benefits we as readers gain from Bellow's exposure to Chicago's backwardness is the sense of comedy he derives from juxtaposing within its midst the earthy and erudite, the boorish and the genteel, the criminal and the upright. Through sudden shifts, both upward and downward, from one level of association to the next he amuses us with his daredevil cultural leaps and chameleon changes of narrative voice."

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Sex: Saul Bellow's Hedonistic Joke." Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 223–29. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 175–80.
  

  Details Bellow's treatment of sex as a laughable preoccupation in which the hero "experiences some difficulty in learning the rules and familiarizing himself with the other players' techniques." Sex in the Bellow novel is depicted primarily as a game. Usually the hero feels duped into thinking that through sex he has fused with another person.

• Coren, Alan. "Displaced Persons." Punch 19 Oct. 1966: 603.
  

  Characterizes the funadmental condition of the Bellow hero as general anxiety-ridden, and complains that none of the novels provide any action. Comments on the Hewish component of such angst and concludes that what is turly universal about these works is their disorientation, insecurity, suspicion, and general twentieth-century malaise.

• Corner, Martin. "Humanity and the Everyday: Creatureliness and Textuality in Saul Bellow and John Updike." Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies [Debrecen, Hungary] 1 (1996): 123-32.
  

  Explores the immersion in the quotidian, the" rootedness" of human living examined within the novels of both Updike and Bellow. Suggests that both writers ask what to make of life, whether one should search for some transcendent or direct love, and their veneration of the "givenness" that surrounds us. Shows how Bellow links this issue to the problem of "creatureliness" in AAM and how both writers share Heidegger's sense of human life as being" thrown into givenness" and creatureliness in the face of death. For each of them this question extends into the more specific question of the textuality of the subject. Bellow describes a givenness that is not mere contingency, but a structure which shapes the quotidian. Concludes, however, that there is also a human firmness in his fiction which tends to lift creatureliness out of subjection to circumstance into human dignity.

• Corner, Martin. "Moving Outwards: Consciousness, Discourse and Attention in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Studies in the Novel 32.3 (2000): 369-85.
  

  Describes the tendency of Bellow critics to see his fiction as an inward journey from outer to inner truth, from the confusions of discourse to the truth of the heart. Argues instead that Bellow is that kind of romantic who is a devotee of inclusion, brotherhood, and community. Hence Bellow's heroes engage in the important journey from the separateness of individual life to the morally sustaining connectedness of a shared community of ethical mutuality. In his mature fiction, Bellow offers a pathology of average twentieth-century consciousness as it is formed in discourse, and in a rooting of moral action in the pre-ethical category of attention. Between Herzog and Sammler, they compose a history of the ethical, which begins with a recognition of how average discursive consciousness defeats the moral, and continues through a painful, and not fully resolved, account of the conditions of moral awareness and human interconnection. Provides a detailed explication of this movement away from the self.

• Corner, Martin. "The Patriarchal Blessing: Saul Bellow's Narratives of Childhood." Studies in American Jewish Literature 19 (2000): 16–25.
  

  Describes the extent to which Bellow's fiction rehearses stories and episodes from his childhood. Argues that these are not simply nostalgic interludes, regressions to remote familiarity, or the gravitational center of the fiction. Posits instead that while they contain some of the most memorable moments of his fiction, they seem to belong to a different imaginative world than the rest of his writing, being much more direct and unmediated. They offer an approach to what, for many readers, has been the main problem with Bellow's fiction, that he is given to excessive intellectualization and is unable to create situations of compelling life. He seems to understand with Levinas that though we have no choice but to live within the thematized and the discursive world, our final responsibility is to that which discourse cannot contain. Bellow's fiction resists the conclusion that the novel cannot reach beyond discourse to what discourse cannot contain. Examines Bellow's Napoleon Street section from H and "By the St. Lawrence" as deformations of the form of the Patriarchal Blessing with its curses and blessings.

• Cowley, Malcolm. "The Literary Situation, 1965." University of Mississippi Studies in English 6 (1965): 91–98.
  

  While answering questions at a literary conference, Cowley comments that though Bellow lacks the brilliance of some of the other writers of the period, he makes up for that with his tremendous integrity. Cowley also comments that each new book constitutes a fresh start.

• Cronin, Gloria L "Holy War against the Moderns: Saul Bellow's Antimodernist Critique of Contemporary American Society." Studies in American ]ewish Literature 8.1 (1989): 77–94.
  

  Argues that Bellow's lifelong determination has been to deflect the main course of modernist thinking, which has dominated Western culture and American thought in our century. Traces throughout his interviews, essays, and fiction Bellow's consistent attempts to scorn absurdism, alienation ethics, historicist pessimism, the diminishment of the private self, and the belief in Deus Abscondus. Covers all of the novels up to MDH. Concludes that, as the great metaphysical comedian of contemporary letters, Bellow has quarreled power fully with all the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers and waged a forty-year long holy war in an attempt to rescue contemporary ideas of the Self.

• Bach, Gerhard. "Margin as Center: Bellow and the New Central Europe." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 1–11.
  

  Speaks of the current moment of silence in the immediate post-Cold War years, and the self-silencing and melancholy of many intellectuals at the spectacle of materialist counter-forces which are replacing the ideological conflicts of former years, and which represent a double defeat and a loss for words. Sketches the content of Bellow's 1992 public appearance at Rutgers University, Newark Campus on April 9, 1992 at a conference entitled "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern and Central Europe." Describes this conference attended by Ralph Ellison, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, and William Phelps, along with a large cadre of expatriate and expelled former Soviet writers. Reports the contents of Bellow's address, "Transcending National Boundaries," as establishing a compassionate distance in terms of both the indictment of the West for having abandoned higher values, and the Eastern European governments of depriving their citizens of them. Reports that Bellow condemns both as spiritual deserts and calls the product of Western Enlightenment as the "virtualization" of experience that decomposes social contexts and cultural bonds. Describes Bellow's reactions to the falling of the Berlin Wall and his general jeremiad calling writers everywhere to call upon their transhistorical spiritual powers to witness a set of guiding truths.

• Bach, Gerhard. "Margin as Center: Bellow and Post-WII Europe." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 96–107.
  

  Sketches the content of the 1992 public appearance in the context of the address Bellow gave at Rutgers University, Newark Campus on April 9, 1992 at a conference entitled "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern and Central Europe." The conference was attended by Ralph Ellison, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Dorris Lessing, Susan Sontag, and William Phelps, along with a large cadre of expatriate and expelled former Soviet writers. Reports Bellow as speaking with compassionate distance in terms of the indictment of the West for having abandoned higher values, and the Eastern European governments of depriving their citizens of them. Condemns both as spiritual deserts and calls the product of Western Enlightenment the "virtualization" of experience that decomposes social contexts and cultural bonds. Describes Bellow's reactions to the falling of the Berlin Wall and his general jeremiad calling writers everywhere to call upon their transhistorical spiritual powers to witness a set of guiding truths.

• Bach, Gerhard. "An Open Channel to the Soul: German Thought on Saul Bellow's Planet." Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Peter Freese. Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik 6. Essen: Blaue Eule, 1990. 244–66.
  

  Identifies the 1990's as Bellow's "late period" which is characterized by its more immediate language, more poignant sense of humor, fresher imagery, diminished story-telling, loosened form, philosophizing, and condensed style. Investigates the context of the change from "early," "middle," and "late" Bellow, asserting that the "late" Bellow projects an epistemological position radically different in terms of the death motif than earlier Bellow. Demonstrates the prominent German philosophical underpinnings of the ouvre which are later discarded by Bellow as his characters develop more and more resistance to all systems of ideas. Argues that increasingly the claims for spirituality intensify, as do the visionary tendencies in the fiction. Concludes by noting Bellow's more recent comic, ironic fictional modes, use of Blake, and increasing reliance on wit to steer his characters through the modern apocalypse.

• Bach, Gerhard. "Saul Bellow and the Dialectic of Being Contemporary." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 17–31. Rpt. in Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 3–12.
  

  Reviews the contrary critical points-of-view on Bellow, focusing especially on the affirmative-negativist critical argument. Goes on to establish the categories of "early", "middle", and "later" Bellow, and to show that despite these groupings of the major works, there is a continuing dialectical movement in the novels which provides a link between them all. Argues that Bellow exposes two faces of any given issue on contemporary life with equal compassion and that this creates the energy center of so much of his work. Cites as examples the Spirit of Alternatives in DM, the doppelgänger, Albee, in TV, and the reality instructor in SD. Claims that the works of the 1980s on establish Bellow's major themes as reality, language and death, all of which are dealt with dialectically. Applies this paradigm to a variety of novels. Concludes that in "later" Bellow he projects over new passageways to expose the very center of life, and that like Pop Selbst, he is a magician of self-determination who always has "something up his sleeve."

• Bach, Gerhard. "Saul Bellow's German Reception. Part I." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 52–65. Part lI is scheduled for publication in Saul Bellow Journal 6.1 (1987).
  

  Provides an extremely thorough treatment of the cultural bias of German responses to Bellow, along with detailed descriptions of the contents of individual works. A very valuable bibliographical essay. Concludes that Bellow's position as a major representative of contemporary American writers is unquestioned in Germany, but adds that it is Herzog, and the kinds of social, political, and philosophical issues the Bellow novel raises, that have drawn the most attention from German critics.

• Bach, Gerhard. "The Writer's Credo." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 7–13.
  

  Reviews the decades of mixed, critical responses to Bellow's work, and describes Bellow's consistent defense of the imagination and the spirit as the stabilizing center of humane living, the counterforce to the decline of the human in the contemporary world. Notes Bellow's insistence that artists and academics alike must assume their responsibility to instruct, enlighten, and heal. Suggests that the key to Bellow's message lies in his protagonists' heroic convictions about human fellowship, and their paranoia about losing their human and spiritual connections. Concludes that Bellow's works chronicle a major segment of the literary and intellectual life of the twentieth century.

• Bagchee, Mani. "Saul Bellow: The Novelist and His Art." Swarjya [Indai] 27 Nov. 1976: 9–10.
  

  Reviews Bellow's Jewish life, the biographical element of his fiction, biographical details of his life, his debt to earlier socially conscious Chicago, his winning of the Pulitzer Prize, and his habit of intellectual brooding.

• Bailey, Jennifer M. "The Qualified Affirmation of Saul Bellow's Recent Work." Journal of American Studies 7.1 (1973): 67–76.
  

  Discusses the ambivalences which exist in Bellow's mid to late period novels as Bellow demonstrates his inability to "balance his protagonist's subjective reality with a convincing version of their social milieu."

• Baker, Sheridan. "Saul Bellow's Bout with Chivalry." Criticism 9.2 (1967): 109–22.
  

  Suggests that the fantasies and cliches of the chivalric romance appear well into the modern era in the works of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to mention such contemporary works as AAM and HRK. Claims part of Bellow's answer to the faithlessness of the age in which we live is provided through these novelistic means.

• Bakker, Jan. "In Search of Reality: Two American Heroes Compared." Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 4 (1972): 145–61.
  

  Makes an elaborate and detailed comparison of the Hemingway hero and the Bellow hero, focussing primarily on DM. This work is further elaborated in Bakker's major book, Fiction as Survival Strategy: A Comparative Study of the Major Works of Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow (1983).

• Bakker, J. "Saul Bellow: A Writer's Despair." Essays on English and American Literature and a Sheaf of Poems Offered to David Wilkinson on the Occasion of His Retirement from the Chair of English Literature in the University of Groningen. Ed. J. Bakker et al. Costerus ns 63. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987. 177–90.
  

  Begins with a summary of the crises of conscience and the exhaustion of hope reflected in the works of contemporary American writers like E. L. Doctorow. Then begins a lengthy treatment of how Bellow's novels treat the issue of despair over the lack of authority of literature, and the ways in which power works in society. Covers each novel chronologically and traces the evolution of this thinking on the subject.

• Balbert, Peter. "Perceptions of Exile: Nabokov, Bellow and the Province of Art." Studies in the Novel 14.1 (1982): 95–104.
  

  Compares the two writers as precocious sons of persecuted Russian minorities, men who in middle life affiliated with major U.S. academic institutions, who use academia as a recurrent theme and locale, and who initially identify themselves as impoverished Jews with aristocratic heritages, and themes of literary exile. Argues that both had to abandon their natural idioms for English, both avoid political partisanship, both are suspicious of popular clamor, and both see art as something to do with arresting people's attention in the midst of distraction.

• Baumgarten, Murray. "Urban Failures, Fictional Possibilitieis." Jewish Book Annual 41 (1983–84): 6–23.
  

  Asserts that the city has shaped Jews and that the key to understanding Bellow's Jewish protagonists is Chicago. Provides a detailed explication of Bellow's philosophical and cultural understanding of urban life. In celebrating the urban conditions, Bellow sees the city as the key to our individuality, imagination, and intellect; and then he begins to see the failure of city life as more of a pathological conditions than a key to maintaining civilization. As Bellow's protagonists enter the mainstream of American life as carriers of urban values, they find themselves confronting dying cities. What is possible for the West and the Jew, now that the city has lost its center, Bellow asks? DD contains Bellow's vision of the Jew naked in the city before the onslaught of modern history, having lost the turf.

• Baumgarten, Murray. "Urban Rites and Civic Premises in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Sandra Schor." Contemporary Literature 34.3 (1993): 395–424.
  

  Discusses how in much Jewish fiction the city becomes the substitute for a land myth or nationhood, yet is never really home. Argues that in Bellow's fiction there is a Jewish self-consciousness about territorial lack. Saul Bellow engages these issues as part of the effort to situate the modern Jewish condition in urban Western history as he writes about the city that has lost its center. Notes that in the Bellow oeure the central city, the city as center, as place rather than condition, becomes the informing history of his characters' lives. We hear its accents in Augie March's designation as Chicago city boy, a twentieth-century Prince Hal demanding a noble destiny. Suggests that Bellow's characters' fundamental experience is of the city—the hope of our individuality, a philosophical activity, a career in survival, a healing place, and the site of the modern quest for worth. Deals with a wide variety of Bellow novels and characters from this perspective and then concludes that at this end of his life Bellow seems to be observing that the Western city has simultaneously expanded and shrunk—to the university campus and the shopping mall. Urban life is now only the background against which the mythic drama of the superpowers emerges, and from which the universe is rushing apart from its center.

• Belitt, Ben. "Saul Bellow: The Depth Factor." Salmagundi 30 (1975): 57–65. Rpt. in The Forgéd Feature: Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty: New and Selected Essays. New York: Fordham UP, 1995. 87–96.
  

  Defines the term "depth" from painting and applies it to literature with specific reference to several Bellow novels.

• Bellamy, Michael O. "Bellow's More-or-Less Human Bestiaries: Augie March and Henderson the Rain King." Ball State University Forum 23.1 (1982): 12–22.
  

  Suggests that one of the chief methods by which Bellow goes about determining in his novels just what exactly is human is by "comparing man to his fellow creatures, a device which provides a kind of scale of creatures, a chain of living beings against which to measure what truly is human." His bestiaries, AAM and HRK, serve another function that is equally important in defining what truly is human. The enormous number and variety of animals in these two novels point us toward Bellow's belief in man's immanence within nature. We are reminded by the ubiquity of these creatures that man is himself a creature whose nature is to be assessed not only over against the animal kingdom, but also within that kingdom in terms of the way he interacts with his fellow creatures.

• Bellman, Samuel I. "Two-Part Harmony: Domestic Relations and Social Vision in the Modern Novel." California English Journal 3.1 (1967): 31–41.
  

  Describes briefly how SD and H "point up the shabbiness and brittleness, and emptiness of urbanized society in terms of weak, foolish husbands making messes out of their home lives while their wives trample on them." This discussion is part of a much longer discussion on the general subject of domestic relations in the twentieth-century American novel.

• Berets, Ralph. "Repudiation and Reality Instruction in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Centennial Review 20.1 (1976): 75–101.
  

  Discusses Bellow's fiction within the context of the idea that each central character fluctuates between his own forces and those of reality instructors who present "alternative philosophical perspectives." Illustrates that in some works "the same individual is the vehicle for repudiation and redemption, but in most works different characters perform these roles."

• Bernstein, Michael Andre. "Saul Bellow: Essayism, Allegory and the Realistic Novel." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 89–93.
  

  Argues that when the mind-numbing labels and coercive certainties are removed from Bellow's catalogue, we can recognize that the compulsion to analyze and explain that energizes many of his finest novelistic moments is his testament to life. Praises the obsessive manic eloquence of the protagonists' views about world history, the spirit of the time, and the way we live now. Sees Bellow's great strength as the ability to absorb vivid, often flamboyantly theatrical intellectual arguments into the structure of a basically monologic narrative–but it often comes at a considerable cost. In both their successes and in their limitations, Bellow's writings directly engage the most basic question of the novel as a form–its capacity to keep up the vivid conversation about the narratability of ordinary human experience in a manner consonant with the inherent intricacy and open-endedness of that experience.

• Berthoff, Warner. A Literature without Qualities: American Writing Since 1945. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1979. [passim].
  
  
• Bertonneau, Thomas F. "Saul Bellow and Walker Percy: Eulogists of the Soul." Studies in American Jewish Fiction 14 (1995): 94–100.
  

  Argues that Saul Bellow remains a positively Jewish writer who is trying to come to terms with, and deliberately defending, what can legitimately be called Christian society. Meanwhile, Walker Percy, a Christian writer, was passionately convinced that modernity faced danger unless it restored its appreciation of its Jewish roots. Sees both writers as conservatives who depict the modern condition of society in the later half of the twentieth century as morally, linguistically, and culturally atavistic. Concludes that both are swimmers against the stream who speak for the gravity of the self.

• Bezanker, Abraham. "The Odyssey of Saul Bellow." Yale Review 58.3 (1969): 359–71.
  

  Praises Bellow for his "speculative brilliance," and for assimilating the literary and intellectual traditions of the West, and for re-shaping them into rich, vivid, and persuasive characterizations. Describes Be!low's odyssey as a Jewish writer, illuminating several key themes and generalizing about several works as he does so.

• Bigsby, C. W. E. "Saul Bellow and the Liberal Tradition in American Literature." Forum [Houston] 14.1 (1976): 56–62.
  

  Begins with the assumption that the old liberal tradition may have been lost in contemporary literature, and that Bellow is busy, along with other contemporary American novelists, trying to find out what a human being is, if indeed he is not what he was thought to be a century ago. Concludes that the liberal tradition is alive and well in the Bellow novel.

• Bilton, A. "The Colored City: Saul Bellow's Chicago and Images of Blackness." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 104–128.
  

  Aruges that Bellow's writing witnesses the extent to which environment and the physical represents that stubborn substratum which resists humankind's attempts to impose systems of order. Particularly, this site has its roots in the richly textured reminiscences of Bellow's old neighborhood, and his adolescent struggles. Within this setting, the dualism between language and reality, ideas and things plays out in the in the urban street environment between governing consulate and the marginalized other. In the classic colonial narrative, the black or alien other, appears as a reflection of the fears and desires of the dominant gaze, thus signifying otherness as a source of both white anxiety and white fantasy. Such a paradigm is problematized in Jewish writing. Explores Bellow's engagement with the urban realities of Chicago and more—specifically with African American neighborhoods within it—as a nature of order and chao. Then related these categories to his own sense of identity and ethnicity. Chicago–both the colored jungle city and a monochrome prairie space–serve to illuminate and define the contradictions at the heart of Bellow's urban sensibility. Appearing under various guises, this conflict between civilization and savagery is obsessively formulated and reformulated in Bellow's fiction. Covers a variety of novels and shorter works.

• Binni, Francesco. "Percorso narrativo di Saul Bellow." Ponte 22 (1966): 831–42.
  

  Suggests that Bellow is not an author of only one book like so many other American writers. Bellow thinks that the writer must have a certain influence (weight) on society. He is different from Hemingway. He concerns himself with isolation and triumphant individuality and practices the aesthetics of the "hard boiled." Describes the dilemma between the will of being self-sufficient and risk of a social emptiness. Concentrates on DM and AAM. Compares Bellow with other recent authors. Comments on Bellow's admiration for the European writers, and the war of power in America concerning the social system vs. the writer. Discusses Bellow's importance in terms of his belief in man's ability and in the search for self and brotherhood.

• Bischoff, Peter. "Protagonist und Umwelt in Saul Bellows Romanen: Ein Forschungsbericht." Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [Kiel] 8 (1975): 257–76.
  
  
• Blades, John. "Bellow in Boston: Saul Bellow Finds Chicago Is a Nice Place to Be a Visitor." Chicago Tribune December l995 Zone C: Update '95.
  

  Contains a brief account of various pithy remarks made by Bellow upon his return to Chicago. Discusses his eightieth birthday with wife Janis, his sons and his grandsons, his illness and convalescence, and his novel-in-progress.

• Blades, John. "Spare Bellow the Premature Dissections." Chicago Tribune 2 Mar. 1990: 5: 1.
  

  Contains an account of Bellow's threat to sue St. Martin's Press if the company went ahead with plans to publish Ruth Miller's "Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination." Discusses his subsequent insistence that they recall the project (after proof copies had already been sent out) and remove some of the material. Describes Miller's book as an extensive treatment of Bellow's tempestuous private life, and discusses Bellow's refusal to comment on his actions. Draws parallels between this situation and the previous Salinger legal action of 1986 in which a federal judge upheld the reclusive author's attempt to prevent Random House from publishing Ian Hamilton's Salinger biography. Also discusses a telephone conversation with Ruth Miller at Hebrew University in which she reportedly says that the revised book would be "depersonalized' at Bellow's request, but not substantially changed. Goes on to describe the Miller biography as highly personal, academically rigorous, a pastiche of reminiscence, speeches, private conversations, microscopic analyses of the fiction, lengthy plot summaries and extensive conjecture about the connections between Bellow's life and his work. Suggests Bellow was disturbed by Miller's description of his later work as increasingly misogynistic in tone after the break-up of his second marriage, her lengthy list of his paramours, as well as a cast list of who the characters in the novels were based on. Discusses the attempts of recent writers—Mark Harris, Ruth Miller, James Atlas, and Mimi Schwarz of Esquire—to write biographies of Bellow, describes their various approaches to their subject, and reports Bellow's objection: "The game isn't over till it's over. So I do drag my feet a bit, but it's not out of ill will. My attitude is, I'm busy, let me be. I'm still struggling, battling, fighting, whatever you want to call it, to get it right. I haven't hung up my gloves yet."

• Blades, John. "Stop the Presses: Bellow's Clout Delays Biography." Chicago Tribune 18 Apr. 1990: sec. 5: 1.
  

  Comments that like Salinger, Bellow has the legal and literary muscle to stop his biography's going to press. Notes Ruth Miller's access to Bellow's personal papers, her subsequent biography, and Bellow's insistence that St. Martin's Press withhold it for his approval. Details the major events and repeats the information in the above entry.

• Bloom, Alexander. "Saul Bellow and the 'Axial Lines' of Life." The New York Intellectuals and their World. Alexander Bloom. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. 290–97.
  

  Discusses the axial lines of influence which provide Bellow's intellectual contexts. Details his association with the Partisan Review intellectually and his personal associations in New York and Chicago. Provides an explanation of the artistic and intellectual coming-of-age of Bellow throughout the several stages of his life. Asserts that the central themes of much of Bellow's fiction is so much more than the literary rehashing of the issues of the New York intellectual world.

• Bloomberg, Edward. "Saul Bellow Looks at France." Saul Bellow Journal 9.2 (1990): 68–81.
  

  Documents with considerable detail Bellow's early childhood mastery of French as one of the four languages Bellow spoke in Lachine. Describes also his ability to converse, conduct interviews, translate, and read widely in French literature. Speaks of the influence of Pascal, Rousseau, Sartre, and Proust on particular Bellow works. Suggests that further investigation of Bellow's use of the French language and the French literary influence in his work would be worthwhile since they suggest a degree of Francophilia. Concludes that Proust is probably Bellow's favorite twentieth-century author because he alone in France rejects a mechanistic view of man and is the quintessential advocate of art for art's sake. Notes also Bellow's repudiation of the French intellectual class as a danger to all humanity, and his disgust with the infuriating French sense of cultural superiority. Concludes that Bellow's overall view of the French plainly is not "a Gallic synthesis, delicately poised twixt thesis and antithesis. The good Frenchmen belong almost entirely to history."

• Boddy, Kasia. "The White Boy Looks at the Black Boy, The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and the Great Omni-American Novel." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 51–73.
  

  Describes Saul Bellow's friendship with Ralph Ellison and their admiration of each other's work. Details the shared formal, aesthetic, and thematic concerns of Invisible Man and AAM. Describes in detail the different ways in which these two novels negociate between a desire for ethnic and racial self-expression, and a liberal universalist and individualist agenga. Argues that both strive towards that mythic holdall, The Great American Novel, or in Albert Murray's phrase, the Great Omni-American Novel. Concludes that what Ellison, Faulkner, Melville, Proust, and Bellow bring about is not omni-American, but omni-world literature.

• Borrus, Bruce J. "Bellow's Critique of the Intellect." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 29–45.
  

  While Bellow's thinkers clearly value the process of thought, they are often incapable of accomplishing anything. Though aware of the reasons for their alienation from society, they cannot think their way through to accommodation. "Thinking leads only to more thinking—not action....The life of the mind seems useless outside of the library." Argues that Bellow toys with the idea that a decrease in self-awareness might mean greater strength and freedom to act.

• Bosha, Francis J. "The Critical Reception of Saul Bellow in Japan." Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 34–46.
  

  Dates the beginning of Japanese interest in Western literature from the Meiji era (1867–1912). Explains that serious Bellow scholarship begins with Motoji Karita's translation of AAM. Bellow studies were then stimulated by Bellow's visit to Japan in 1972 and the Nobel Prize in 1976. Most Japanese literary scholarship is not indexed and circulates only within individual academies and universities. By 1965 there were many articles on H. The most noted Japanese scholar is Yazaburo Shibuya, who has translated and annotated a number of novels and written a book-length study and numerous articles on Bellow. Describes the 1970's as a prolific period of Bellow scholarship in Japan. Documents much of the critical opinion of this period. Discusses Shibuya's Bellow Kaishin no Kiseki (1978). (Item 197.) States that in the 1980's many Bellow novels appeared on reading lists of Japanese colleges and universities.

• Botsford, Keith. "Dissed! The Misadventures of Saul Bellow; 'Racist' Is the Cry." Independent 31 Mar. 1994: 2.
  

  Makes no direct comment at all about Bellow, but recounts the story of the South African Colonel Alwyn Wolfaards who drove into the black homeland of Bophuthatswana on 11 March "to kill some kaffirs." There a black policeman executed him in hot blood. The rest is the story of David Cohen, who goes back to find this man's family that made him. The narrative presumably functions as a counter-argument to comparatively trivial accusations that Bellow is a racist.

• Boyer, Jay. "Searching for Survivors: Saul Bellow and the Holocaust." Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Adenda. Eds. Yehuda Bauer, et. al. Vol. 2. Oxford; New York: Pergamon, 1989. 1429–40. 3 vols.
  

  Discusses the propensity of the American novel to deal in large, powerful giants of men who can act effectively upon the world and coerce it, while in fact since the Holocaust, a new sort of helpless, victimized protagonist has entered our literature. Focuses in particular upon the Jewish-American phenomenon of producing such heroes and upon Bellow's unusually large number of victimized men and survivors. Asserts that the Bellow hero is increasingly faced with diminished capacity for choice and that the lesson Bellow and other Jewish-American writers have given us is the sense that we cannot lose the capacity for choice without losing our souls. Concludes: "It's how we best participate in human longing and human suffering; against the long polar nights, how we best survive."

• Brackenhoff, Mary. "Humboldt's Gift: The Ego's Mirror—A Vehicle for Self-Realization." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 15–21.
  

  Discusses the fact that because his protagonists are frequently blinded by their egocentricity, they need to distance themselves from their own strong personalities in order to examine and, hopefully, redirect their lives. To aid his protagonists, Bellow has frequently employed a narrative ingenuity or caste of secondary characters to provide mirror images, alter egos, or reality instructors—points of view that throw the protagonists' characters into relief."

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "He Is the Most Superb Recorder of America in Its Age of Closure and Mindless Plushness." Guardian 2 Dec. 2000: 3.
  

  Commends Bellow in his 85th year for R. Reviews the plot and comments that R is a neutral figure in the Bellow gallery with his humanism, classic seriousness, and lush vulgarity. Commends Bellow's style and tone for its consistency, vernacular sounds, and tis medatative, comic, and metaphysical sctrupulosity. Concludes that no modern writer has so superbly recorded the age of America in its age of closure and mindless plushness.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Leaving the Fifties: The Change of Style in American Writing." Encounter [London] 45.1 (1975): 40–51.
  

  Describes American writing generally in the 1970's, and makes passing reference to Bellow in the general context of many writers and influences.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Liberal and Existential Imaginations: The 1940s and 1950s." The Modern American Novel. New ed. New York: Viking, 1993. 169–75.
  

  Discusses Bellow in the context of the forces which shaped American social and literary history during the 1940s and 1950s. Suggests that the post-40s novel, including Bellow's works, abandoned the large mythic themes of the early moderns, engaged in moral uncertainty and metaphysical complexity, was more alienated than its European counterparts, and was shaped in a dark, post-Holocaust era shaken by evil. Sees Bellow exploring the place of the individual as beneficiary or exile who suffers urban anonymity, behavioral indifference, and the totalitarian massing of social force. Also comments on the rich Jewish humanism and the heritage of European philosophical thought which shapes most of his heroes, who are also heirs of modernist romanticism. Comments on how each of the books published in these two decades reflects the decade in which it was written. Sees DM as a struggle between determinism and humanism, and AAM, SD, and HRK, as more ebullient and picaresque. Sees H as exploring the notion of modern selfhood in the 1960s, and MSP as a book about revolutionary consciousness, black power, florid romanticism, irrationalism and hyper-civilized Byzantine lunacy. HG deals with two generations of writers, while DD is about a man trying to reconcile social observation with astrophysical knowledge.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "'The Nightmare in Which I am Trying to Get a Good Night's Rest': Saul Bellow and Changing History." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum Voor Taal En Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. Symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) on 10–11 Dec. 1977. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow and Changing History" in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 129–46.
  

  Attempts to account for the dark places in the novels, and to detail Bellow's European appeal. Discusses also the ambiguous Bellow ending in light of the themes of darkness and the influence of European thinking in the novels. Concludes that the Bellow hero lives in a world where metaphysical measurements cannot be taken, yet where the mind insists that they be taken anyway.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow's Intellectual Heroes." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 33–39.
  

  Compares the prominence of Gyorgy Lukàcs to Bellow because he was an exemplary European intellectual who fought against the "leaking away of life into nothingness," who set his face against the Modern. Reviews Bellow's views of the modern and postmodern heroes in American fiction. Describes Bellow's protagonists as "heros in space" who, like Lukàcs' are distinctively flamboyant intellectuals burdened with the moral and philosophical duties of the thinking mind, and who are persistently in search of reality. Sees Bellow's writing over five decades as full of argumentative ideas, intellectual issues, conflicts of the tricky, inchoate half-century weighted with the heavy inheritance of romantic and modernist thought which now comes under to its close in a new post-Marxist era of its ideological and mental uncertainty. Compares Claudio Magris' account of the anguish of Lukàcs' trip down the Danube with Bellow's heroes also trying to find an answer to dissolution. Concludes that rereading Bellow for his seventy-fifth birthday he has set out on his own Danubian voyage with more than literary-critical interest, since he too is trying to write a novel about European intellectual existence in the world beyond Marx and Lukàcs, a novel about a time when the great ideological preconceptions that guided much of the century have truly come apart, and when a vast mental reorganization is now due. Pays tribute to Bellow's "vital and glorious guidance" in this project.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow and the Naturalist Tradition." Review of English Literature 4.4 (1963): 80–92.
  

  Links Bellow to the great Russian naturalists and identifies his subject matter primarily as the answer to the question "How should a good man live?" Sees the two early novels as controlled and oppressively moral. Sees the advent of AAM as a broadening out, even though it and subsequent novels are still concerned with Darwinian ideas, evolution and struggle.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow and the Nobel Prize." Journal of American Studies 11.1 (1977): 3–12.
  

  Praises the Nobel Prize committee for its choice of Saul Bellow as candidate for the award. Discusses the propensity of judges to award the prize to writers who deal in moral affirmations, and proceeds to justify the award to Bellow on these grounds and others. A useful thematic overview of the works concludes the article.

• Braem, Helmut M. "Der Weg Saul Bellows." Neue Rundschau 4 (1971): 742–752.
  

  Traces Bellow's development as a novelist of ideas from DM to MSP. Characterizes Bellow's protagonists as alienated academics who loathe academia, as outsiders whose conflicts with de-individualizing society teach them lessons in self-preservation, compassion and acceptance. Suggests that Bellow 'has broken with several American traditions, from Faulkner's naturalism to Hemingway's realism, projecting American literature into a new era, which Braem describes rather than defines. He sees Bellow's heroes as "dangling" between the two worlds of ideas and reality. Estranged from both, their estrangement is not a Marxist alienation but a voluntary self-denial for the sake of a higher social order. Searching for their place in the world, they encounter the world and themselves as suffering but compassionate—basically "content to be as is willed." They all share Bummidge's burden of "humanitas" and Sammler's somewhat sentimental strife for a "sanctified simplicity."

• Braham, Jeanne. "The Struggle at the Center: Dostoyevsky and Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 13–18.
  

  Briefly outlines Bellow's debt to Dostoyevsky and the Russian realists, and points out that while he obviously admires the Russians tremendously, his own fiction registers an attempt at transcendence which remains short of resolution? Like the Russian novelists, he would like to lead his protagonist away from the void, but instead he details all the road blocks. What happens in the Bellow novel is the undercutting of the protagonists' efforts in such a way that they mock his beliefs in transcendence. The fiction registers the value of the continuous process of ethical struggle—not religious questing. "Transcendence is a means not an end."

• Brauner, David. "Three Solemn Buffoons: Comedy as Alibi in Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 13.1 (1995): 64–82.
  

  Argues that even though Bellow is considered a comic writer, he is rarely funny, only elusively ironic, not much given to one-liners and gags, only occasionally satiric, not really given to fantasy, and neither Aristophanic or Aristotelian in his sense of humor. Traces this pattern of telling about the hero's sense of humor. Suggests Bellow's comedy arises from our being told about the heroes' senses of humor. Traces this pattern of telling about the hero's sense of humor through three buffoons: Herzog in H, Augie March in AAM, and Dr. Mosby in MM. Yet despite this these characters are mostly solemn, not witty, and through assuming postures of enlightened self-awareness, they reveal only the darkness of self-ignorance. In claiming the ability to laugh at others because they can laugh at themselves–using comedy as an alibi–they reveal the monstrous egoism of the solemn buffoon. Concludes by questioning the fairness of this and wonders if Bellow should be allowed to get away with it.

• Brodin, Pierre. "Saul Bellow." Continuateurs et Novateurs; Ecrivains americains d'aujourd'hui. Pierre Brodin. Paris: Debreise, 1973. 33–38.
  
  
• Bryant, Jerry H. "Ambiguity and Affirmation: The Moral Outlook." The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and its Intellectual Background. Jerry H. Bryant. New York: Free Press, 1970. 341–69.
  
  
• Buelens, Gert. "American-Jewish Narrative and Multicultural Society–Then and Now." Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Literature. Ed. Hans Bak. European Contributions to American Studies 23. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1993. 228–39.
  

  Provides a history of American-Jewish fiction from its roots in Eastern European culture of the 19th Century to its immigrant experiences in America's cities. What follows is an endless dynamics of ethnic construction and deconstruction. Bellow's fiction provides a monadic narrative center incorporating the dual American-European stance of the protagonist in such a way as to suggest the possibility of an imaginary wholeness. Rather than having to engage too much in the fallen world, Bellow's protagonists are allowed to withdraw into a rarified existence as monads enjoying wholeness of their own imaginary making. Focuses largely on MSP

• Buitenhuis, Peter. "A Corresponding Fabric: The Urban World of Saul Bellow." Costerus 8 (1973): 13–35.
  
  
• Bullock, C. J. "On the Marxist Criticism of the Contemporary Novel in the United States: A Re-Evaluation of Saul Bellow." Praxis 1.2 (1976): 189–98.
  

  Accuses modern criticism of failing to come to terms with the 'socio-historical specificity of the contemporary American novel. "The article then proceeds to a methodological exercise in Marxist criticism which takes the Bellow hero under consideration.

• Burgess, Anthony. "The Jew as American." Spectator 7 Oct. 1966: 455–56.
  

  In TV he seems to be playing a popular anti-semitic tune but with ambivalent counterpoint. Out of the hostile symbiosis of Albee and Leventhal these two attempt to define themselves as men, failing for the most part because of self-pity. Claims that Bellow is working the Death of a Salesman theme in his own terms. Applauds the concreteness of descriptive language with which Bellow clothes his ideas and abstractions.

• Burns, Robert. "The Urban Experience: The Novels of Saul Bellow." Dissent 24 (1969): 18–24.
  

  Bellow concerns himself with how a man surrounded and swallowed in "the bowels of the monster metropolis" can survive in spirit. Concludes that Bellow portrays such an environmental force as bounded and merely objective, while the human spirit is not thus bound and static.

• Bach, Gerhard. "Margin as Center: Bellow and the New Central Europe." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 1–11.
  

  Speaks of the current moment of silence in the immediate post-Cold War years, and the self-silencing and melancholy of many intellectuals at the spectacle of materialist counter-forces which are replacing the ideological conflicts of former years, and which represent a double defeat and a loss for words. Sketches the content of Bellow's 1992 public appearance at Rutgers University, Newark Campus on April 9, 1992 at a conference entitled "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern and Central Europe." Describes this conference attended by Ralph Ellison, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, and William Phelps, along with a large cadre of expatriate and expelled former Soviet writers. Reports the contents of Bellow's address, "Transcending National Boundaries," as establishing a compassionate distance in terms of both the indictment of the West for having abandoned higher values, and the Eastern European governments of depriving their citizens of them. Reports that Bellow condemns both as spiritual deserts and calls the product of Western Enlightenment as the "virtualization" of experience that decomposes social contexts and cultural bonds. Describes Bellow's reactions to the falling of the Berlin Wall and his general jeremiad calling writers everywhere to call upon their transhistorical spiritual powers to witness a set of guiding truths.

• Bach, Gerhard. "Margin as Center: Bellow and Post-WII Europe." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 96–107.
  

  Sketches the content of the 1992 public appearance in the context of the address Bellow gave at Rutgers University, Newark Campus on April 9, 1992 at a conference entitled "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern and Central Europe." The conference was attended by Ralph Ellison, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Dorris Lessing, Susan Sontag, and William Phelps, along with a large cadre of expatriate and expelled former Soviet writers. Reports Bellow as speaking with compassionate distance in terms of the indictment of the West for having abandoned higher values, and the Eastern European governments of depriving their citizens of them. Condemns both as spiritual deserts and calls the product of Western Enlightenment the "virtualization" of experience that decomposes social contexts and cultural bonds. Describes Bellow's reactions to the falling of the Berlin Wall and his general jeremiad calling writers everywhere to call upon their transhistorical spiritual powers to witness a set of guiding truths.

• Bach, Gerhard. "An Open Channel to the Soul: German Thought on Saul Bellow's Planet." Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Peter Freese. Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik 6. Essen: Blaue Eule, 1990. 244–66.
  

  Identifies the 1990's as Bellow's "late period" which is characterized by its more immediate language, more poignant sense of humor, fresher imagery, diminished story-telling, loosened form, philosophizing, and condensed style. Investigates the context of the change from "early," "middle," and "late" Bellow, asserting that the "late" Bellow projects an epistemological position radically different in terms of the death motif than earlier Bellow. Demonstrates the prominent German philosophical underpinnings of the ouvre which are later discarded by Bellow as his characters develop more and more resistance to all systems of ideas. Argues that increasingly the claims for spirituality intensify, as do the visionary tendencies in the fiction. Concludes by noting Bellow's more recent comic, ironic fictional modes, use of Blake, and increasing reliance on wit to steer his characters through the modern apocalypse.

• Bach, Gerhard. "Saul Bellow and the Dialectic of Being Contemporary." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 17–31. Rpt. in Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 3–12.
  

  Reviews the contrary critical points-of-view on Bellow, focusing especially on the affirmative-negativist critical argument. Goes on to establish the categories of "early", "middle", and "later" Bellow, and to show that despite these groupings of the major works, there is a continuing dialectical movement in the novels which provides a link between them all. Argues that Bellow exposes two faces of any given issue on contemporary life with equal compassion and that this creates the energy center of so much of his work. Cites as examples the Spirit of Alternatives in DM, the doppelgänger, Albee, in TV, and the reality instructor in SD. Claims that the works of the 1980s on establish Bellow's major themes as reality, language and death, all of which are dealt with dialectically. Applies this paradigm to a variety of novels. Concludes that in "later" Bellow he projects over new passageways to expose the very center of life, and that like Pop Selbst, he is a magician of self-determination who always has "something up his sleeve."

• Bach, Gerhard. "Saul Bellow's German Reception. Part I." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 52–65. Part lI is scheduled for publication in Saul Bellow Journal 6.1 (1987).
  

  Provides an extremely thorough treatment of the cultural bias of German responses to Bellow, along with detailed descriptions of the contents of individual works. A very valuable bibliographical essay. Concludes that Bellow's position as a major representative of contemporary American writers is unquestioned in Germany, but adds that it is Herzog, and the kinds of social, political, and philosophical issues the Bellow novel raises, that have drawn the most attention from German critics.

• Bach, Gerhard. "The Writer's Credo." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 7–13.
  

  Reviews the decades of mixed, critical responses to Bellow's work, and describes Bellow's consistent defense of the imagination and the spirit as the stabilizing center of humane living, the counterforce to the decline of the human in the contemporary world. Notes Bellow's insistence that artists and academics alike must assume their responsibility to instruct, enlighten, and heal. Suggests that the key to Bellow's message lies in his protagonists' heroic convictions about human fellowship, and their paranoia about losing their human and spiritual connections. Concludes that Bellow's works chronicle a major segment of the literary and intellectual life of the twentieth century.

• Bagchee, Mani. "Saul Bellow: The Novelist and His Art." Swarjya [Indai] 27 Nov. 1976: 9–10.
  

  Reviews Bellow's Jewish life, the biographical element of his fiction, biographical details of his life, his debt to earlier socially conscious Chicago, his winning of the Pulitzer Prize, and his habit of intellectual brooding.

• Bailey, Jennifer M. "The Qualified Affirmation of Saul Bellow's Recent Work." Journal of American Studies 7.1 (1973): 67–76.
  

  Discusses the ambivalences which exist in Bellow's mid to late period novels as Bellow demonstrates his inability to "balance his protagonist's subjective reality with a convincing version of their social milieu."

• Baker, Sheridan. "Saul Bellow's Bout with Chivalry." Criticism 9.2 (1967): 109–22.
  

  Suggests that the fantasies and cliches of the chivalric romance appear well into the modern era in the works of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to mention such contemporary works as AAM and HRK. Claims part of Bellow's answer to the faithlessness of the age in which we live is provided through these novelistic means.

• Bakker, Jan. "In Search of Reality: Two American Heroes Compared." Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 4 (1972): 145–61.
  

  Makes an elaborate and detailed comparison of the Hemingway hero and the Bellow hero, focussing primarily on DM. This work is further elaborated in Bakker's major book, Fiction as Survival Strategy: A Comparative Study of the Major Works of Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow (1983).

• Bakker, J. "Saul Bellow: A Writer's Despair." Essays on English and American Literature and a Sheaf of Poems Offered to David Wilkinson on the Occasion of His Retirement from the Chair of English Literature in the University of Groningen. Ed. J. Bakker et al. Costerus ns 63. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987. 177–90.
  

  Begins with a summary of the crises of conscience and the exhaustion of hope reflected in the works of contemporary American writers like E. L. Doctorow. Then begins a lengthy treatment of how Bellow's novels treat the issue of despair over the lack of authority of literature, and the ways in which power works in society. Covers each novel chronologically and traces the evolution of this thinking on the subject.

• Balbert, Peter. "Perceptions of Exile: Nabokov, Bellow and the Province of Art." Studies in the Novel 14.1 (1982): 95–104.
  

  Compares the two writers as precocious sons of persecuted Russian minorities, men who in middle life affiliated with major U.S. academic institutions, who use academia as a recurrent theme and locale, and who initially identify themselves as impoverished Jews with aristocratic heritages, and themes of literary exile. Argues that both had to abandon their natural idioms for English, both avoid political partisanship, both are suspicious of popular clamor, and both see art as something to do with arresting people's attention in the midst of distraction.

• Baumgarten, Murray. "Urban Failures, Fictional Possibilitieis." Jewish Book Annual 41 (1983–84): 6–23.
  

  Asserts that the city has shaped Jews and that the key to understanding Bellow's Jewish protagonists is Chicago. Provides a detailed explication of Bellow's philosophical and cultural understanding of urban life. In celebrating the urban conditions, Bellow sees the city as the key to our individuality, imagination, and intellect; and then he begins to see the failure of city life as more of a pathological conditions than a key to maintaining civilization. As Bellow's protagonists enter the mainstream of American life as carriers of urban values, they find themselves confronting dying cities. What is possible for the West and the Jew, now that the city has lost its center, Bellow asks? DD contains Bellow's vision of the Jew naked in the city before the onslaught of modern history, having lost the turf.

• Baumgarten, Murray. "Urban Rites and Civic Premises in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Sandra Schor." Contemporary Literature 34.3 (1993): 395–424.
  

  Discusses how in much Jewish fiction the city becomes the substitute for a land myth or nationhood, yet is never really home. Argues that in Bellow's fiction there is a Jewish self-consciousness about territorial lack. Saul Bellow engages these issues as part of the effort to situate the modern Jewish condition in urban Western history as he writes about the city that has lost its center. Notes that in the Bellow oeure the central city, the city as center, as place rather than condition, becomes the informing history of his characters' lives. We hear its accents in Augie March's designation as Chicago city boy, a twentieth-century Prince Hal demanding a noble destiny. Suggests that Bellow's characters' fundamental experience is of the city—the hope of our individuality, a philosophical activity, a career in survival, a healing place, and the site of the modern quest for worth. Deals with a wide variety of Bellow novels and characters from this perspective and then concludes that at this end of his life Bellow seems to be observing that the Western city has simultaneously expanded and shrunk—to the university campus and the shopping mall. Urban life is now only the background against which the mythic drama of the superpowers emerges, and from which the universe is rushing apart from its center.

• Belitt, Ben. "Saul Bellow: The Depth Factor." Salmagundi 30 (1975): 57–65. Rpt. in The Forgéd Feature: Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty: New and Selected Essays. New York: Fordham UP, 1995. 87–96.
  

  Defines the term "depth" from painting and applies it to literature with specific reference to several Bellow novels.

• Bellamy, Michael O. "Bellow's More-or-Less Human Bestiaries: Augie March and Henderson the Rain King." Ball State University Forum 23.1 (1982): 12–22.
  

  Suggests that one of the chief methods by which Bellow goes about determining in his novels just what exactly is human is by "comparing man to his fellow creatures, a device which provides a kind of scale of creatures, a chain of living beings against which to measure what truly is human." His bestiaries, AAM and HRK, serve another function that is equally important in defining what truly is human. The enormous number and variety of animals in these two novels point us toward Bellow's belief in man's immanence within nature. We are reminded by the ubiquity of these creatures that man is himself a creature whose nature is to be assessed not only over against the animal kingdom, but also within that kingdom in terms of the way he interacts with his fellow creatures.

• Bellman, Samuel I. "Two-Part Harmony: Domestic Relations and Social Vision in the Modern Novel." California English Journal 3.1 (1967): 31–41.
  

  Describes briefly how SD and H "point up the shabbiness and brittleness, and emptiness of urbanized society in terms of weak, foolish husbands making messes out of their home lives while their wives trample on them." This discussion is part of a much longer discussion on the general subject of domestic relations in the twentieth-century American novel.

• Berets, Ralph. "Repudiation and Reality Instruction in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Centennial Review 20.1 (1976): 75–101.
  

  Discusses Bellow's fiction within the context of the idea that each central character fluctuates between his own forces and those of reality instructors who present "alternative philosophical perspectives." Illustrates that in some works "the same individual is the vehicle for repudiation and redemption, but in most works different characters perform these roles."

• Bernstein, Michael Andre. "Saul Bellow: Essayism, Allegory and the Realistic Novel." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 89–93.
  

  Argues that when the mind-numbing labels and coercive certainties are removed from Bellow's catalogue, we can recognize that the compulsion to analyze and explain that energizes many of his finest novelistic moments is his testament to life. Praises the obsessive manic eloquence of the protagonists' views about world history, the spirit of the time, and the way we live now. Sees Bellow's great strength as the ability to absorb vivid, often flamboyantly theatrical intellectual arguments into the structure of a basically monologic narrative–but it often comes at a considerable cost. In both their successes and in their limitations, Bellow's writings directly engage the most basic question of the novel as a form–its capacity to keep up the vivid conversation about the narratability of ordinary human experience in a manner consonant with the inherent intricacy and open-endedness of that experience.

• Berthoff, Warner. A Literature without Qualities: American Writing Since 1945. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1979. [passim].
  
  
• Bertonneau, Thomas F. "Saul Bellow and Walker Percy: Eulogists of the Soul." Studies in American Jewish Fiction 14 (1995): 94–100.
  

  Argues that Saul Bellow remains a positively Jewish writer who is trying to come to terms with, and deliberately defending, what can legitimately be called Christian society. Meanwhile, Walker Percy, a Christian writer, was passionately convinced that modernity faced danger unless it restored its appreciation of its Jewish roots. Sees both writers as conservatives who depict the modern condition of society in the later half of the twentieth century as morally, linguistically, and culturally atavistic. Concludes that both are swimmers against the stream who speak for the gravity of the self.

• Bezanker, Abraham. "The Odyssey of Saul Bellow." Yale Review 58.3 (1969): 359–71.
  

  Praises Bellow for his "speculative brilliance," and for assimilating the literary and intellectual traditions of the West, and for re-shaping them into rich, vivid, and persuasive characterizations. Describes Be!low's odyssey as a Jewish writer, illuminating several key themes and generalizing about several works as he does so.

• Bigsby, C. W. E. "Saul Bellow and the Liberal Tradition in American Literature." Forum [Houston] 14.1 (1976): 56–62.
  

  Begins with the assumption that the old liberal tradition may have been lost in contemporary literature, and that Bellow is busy, along with other contemporary American novelists, trying to find out what a human being is, if indeed he is not what he was thought to be a century ago. Concludes that the liberal tradition is alive and well in the Bellow novel.

• Bilton, A. "The Colored City: Saul Bellow's Chicago and Images of Blackness." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 104–128.
  

  Aruges that Bellow's writing witnesses the extent to which environment and the physical represents that stubborn substratum which resists humankind's attempts to impose systems of order. Particularly, this site has its roots in the richly textured reminiscences of Bellow's old neighborhood, and his adolescent struggles. Within this setting, the dualism between language and reality, ideas and things plays out in the in the urban street environment between governing consulate and the marginalized other. In the classic colonial narrative, the black or alien other, appears as a reflection of the fears and desires of the dominant gaze, thus signifying otherness as a source of both white anxiety and white fantasy. Such a paradigm is problematized in Jewish writing. Explores Bellow's engagement with the urban realities of Chicago and more—specifically with African American neighborhoods within it—as a nature of order and chao. Then related these categories to his own sense of identity and ethnicity. Chicago–both the colored jungle city and a monochrome prairie space–serve to illuminate and define the contradictions at the heart of Bellow's urban sensibility. Appearing under various guises, this conflict between civilization and savagery is obsessively formulated and reformulated in Bellow's fiction. Covers a variety of novels and shorter works.

• Binni, Francesco. "Percorso narrativo di Saul Bellow." Ponte 22 (1966): 831–42.
  

  Suggests that Bellow is not an author of only one book like so many other American writers. Bellow thinks that the writer must have a certain influence (weight) on society. He is different from Hemingway. He concerns himself with isolation and triumphant individuality and practices the aesthetics of the "hard boiled." Describes the dilemma between the will of being self-sufficient and risk of a social emptiness. Concentrates on DM and AAM. Compares Bellow with other recent authors. Comments on Bellow's admiration for the European writers, and the war of power in America concerning the social system vs. the writer. Discusses Bellow's importance in terms of his belief in man's ability and in the search for self and brotherhood.

• Bischoff, Peter. "Protagonist und Umwelt in Saul Bellows Romanen: Ein Forschungsbericht." Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [Kiel] 8 (1975): 257–76.
  
  
• Blades, John. "Bellow in Boston: Saul Bellow Finds Chicago Is a Nice Place to Be a Visitor." Chicago Tribune December l995 Zone C: Update '95.
  

  Contains a brief account of various pithy remarks made by Bellow upon his return to Chicago. Discusses his eightieth birthday with wife Janis, his sons and his grandsons, his illness and convalescence, and his novel-in-progress.

• Blades, John. "Spare Bellow the Premature Dissections." Chicago Tribune 2 Mar. 1990: 5: 1.
  

  Contains an account of Bellow's threat to sue St. Martin's Press if the company went ahead with plans to publish Ruth Miller's "Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination." Discusses his subsequent insistence that they recall the project (after proof copies had already been sent out) and remove some of the material. Describes Miller's book as an extensive treatment of Bellow's tempestuous private life, and discusses Bellow's refusal to comment on his actions. Draws parallels between this situation and the previous Salinger legal action of 1986 in which a federal judge upheld the reclusive author's attempt to prevent Random House from publishing Ian Hamilton's Salinger biography. Also discusses a telephone conversation with Ruth Miller at Hebrew University in which she reportedly says that the revised book would be "depersonalized' at Bellow's request, but not substantially changed. Goes on to describe the Miller biography as highly personal, academically rigorous, a pastiche of reminiscence, speeches, private conversations, microscopic analyses of the fiction, lengthy plot summaries and extensive conjecture about the connections between Bellow's life and his work. Suggests Bellow was disturbed by Miller's description of his later work as increasingly misogynistic in tone after the break-up of his second marriage, her lengthy list of his paramours, as well as a cast list of who the characters in the novels were based on. Discusses the attempts of recent writers—Mark Harris, Ruth Miller, James Atlas, and Mimi Schwarz of Esquire—to write biographies of Bellow, describes their various approaches to their subject, and reports Bellow's objection: "The game isn't over till it's over. So I do drag my feet a bit, but it's not out of ill will. My attitude is, I'm busy, let me be. I'm still struggling, battling, fighting, whatever you want to call it, to get it right. I haven't hung up my gloves yet."

• Blades, John. "Stop the Presses: Bellow's Clout Delays Biography." Chicago Tribune 18 Apr. 1990: sec. 5: 1.
  

  Comments that like Salinger, Bellow has the legal and literary muscle to stop his biography's going to press. Notes Ruth Miller's access to Bellow's personal papers, her subsequent biography, and Bellow's insistence that St. Martin's Press withhold it for his approval. Details the major events and repeats the information in the above entry.

• Bloom, Alexander. "Saul Bellow and the 'Axial Lines' of Life." The New York Intellectuals and their World. Alexander Bloom. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. 290–97.
  

  Discusses the axial lines of influence which provide Bellow's intellectual contexts. Details his association with the Partisan Review intellectually and his personal associations in New York and Chicago. Provides an explanation of the artistic and intellectual coming-of-age of Bellow throughout the several stages of his life. Asserts that the central themes of much of Bellow's fiction is so much more than the literary rehashing of the issues of the New York intellectual world.

• Bloomberg, Edward. "Saul Bellow Looks at France." Saul Bellow Journal 9.2 (1990): 68–81.
  

  Documents with considerable detail Bellow's early childhood mastery of French as one of the four languages Bellow spoke in Lachine. Describes also his ability to converse, conduct interviews, translate, and read widely in French literature. Speaks of the influence of Pascal, Rousseau, Sartre, and Proust on particular Bellow works. Suggests that further investigation of Bellow's use of the French language and the French literary influence in his work would be worthwhile since they suggest a degree of Francophilia. Concludes that Proust is probably Bellow's favorite twentieth-century author because he alone in France rejects a mechanistic view of man and is the quintessential advocate of art for art's sake. Notes also Bellow's repudiation of the French intellectual class as a danger to all humanity, and his disgust with the infuriating French sense of cultural superiority. Concludes that Bellow's overall view of the French plainly is not "a Gallic synthesis, delicately poised twixt thesis and antithesis. The good Frenchmen belong almost entirely to history."

• Boddy, Kasia. "The White Boy Looks at the Black Boy, The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and the Great Omni-American Novel." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 51–73.
  

  Describes Saul Bellow's friendship with Ralph Ellison and their admiration of each other's work. Details the shared formal, aesthetic, and thematic concerns of Invisible Man and AAM. Describes in detail the different ways in which these two novels negociate between a desire for ethnic and racial self-expression, and a liberal universalist and individualist agenga. Argues that both strive towards that mythic holdall, The Great American Novel, or in Albert Murray's phrase, the Great Omni-American Novel. Concludes that what Ellison, Faulkner, Melville, Proust, and Bellow bring about is not omni-American, but omni-world literature.

• Borrus, Bruce J. "Bellow's Critique of the Intellect." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 29–45.
  

  While Bellow's thinkers clearly value the process of thought, they are often incapable of accomplishing anything. Though aware of the reasons for their alienation from society, they cannot think their way through to accommodation. "Thinking leads only to more thinking—not action....The life of the mind seems useless outside of the library." Argues that Bellow toys with the idea that a decrease in self-awareness might mean greater strength and freedom to act.

• Bosha, Francis J. "The Critical Reception of Saul Bellow in Japan." Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 34–46.
  

  Dates the beginning of Japanese interest in Western literature from the Meiji era (1867–1912). Explains that serious Bellow scholarship begins with Motoji Karita's translation of AAM. Bellow studies were then stimulated by Bellow's visit to Japan in 1972 and the Nobel Prize in 1976. Most Japanese literary scholarship is not indexed and circulates only within individual academies and universities. By 1965 there were many articles on H. The most noted Japanese scholar is Yazaburo Shibuya, who has translated and annotated a number of novels and written a book-length study and numerous articles on Bellow. Describes the 1970's as a prolific period of Bellow scholarship in Japan. Documents much of the critical opinion of this period. Discusses Shibuya's Bellow Kaishin no Kiseki (1978). (Item 197.) States that in the 1980's many Bellow novels appeared on reading lists of Japanese colleges and universities.

• Botsford, Keith. "Dissed! The Misadventures of Saul Bellow; 'Racist' Is the Cry." Independent 31 Mar. 1994: 2.
  

  Makes no direct comment at all about Bellow, but recounts the story of the South African Colonel Alwyn Wolfaards who drove into the black homeland of Bophuthatswana on 11 March "to kill some kaffirs." There a black policeman executed him in hot blood. The rest is the story of David Cohen, who goes back to find this man's family that made him. The narrative presumably functions as a counter-argument to comparatively trivial accusations that Bellow is a racist.

• Boyer, Jay. "Searching for Survivors: Saul Bellow and the Holocaust." Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Adenda. Eds. Yehuda Bauer, et. al. Vol. 2. Oxford; New York: Pergamon, 1989. 1429–40. 3 vols.
  

  Discusses the propensity of the American novel to deal in large, powerful giants of men who can act effectively upon the world and coerce it, while in fact since the Holocaust, a new sort of helpless, victimized protagonist has entered our literature. Focuses in particular upon the Jewish-American phenomenon of producing such heroes and upon Bellow's unusually large number of victimized men and survivors. Asserts that the Bellow hero is increasingly faced with diminished capacity for choice and that the lesson Bellow and other Jewish-American writers have given us is the sense that we cannot lose the capacity for choice without losing our souls. Concludes: "It's how we best participate in human longing and human suffering; against the long polar nights, how we best survive."

• Brackenhoff, Mary. "Humboldt's Gift: The Ego's Mirror—A Vehicle for Self-Realization." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 15–21.
  

  Discusses the fact that because his protagonists are frequently blinded by their egocentricity, they need to distance themselves from their own strong personalities in order to examine and, hopefully, redirect their lives. To aid his protagonists, Bellow has frequently employed a narrative ingenuity or caste of secondary characters to provide mirror images, alter egos, or reality instructors—points of view that throw the protagonists' characters into relief."

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "He Is the Most Superb Recorder of America in Its Age of Closure and Mindless Plushness." Guardian 2 Dec. 2000: 3.
  

  Commends Bellow in his 85th year for R. Reviews the plot and comments that R is a neutral figure in the Bellow gallery with his humanism, classic seriousness, and lush vulgarity. Commends Bellow's style and tone for its consistency, vernacular sounds, and tis medatative, comic, and metaphysical sctrupulosity. Concludes that no modern writer has so superbly recorded the age of America in its age of closure and mindless plushness.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Leaving the Fifties: The Change of Style in American Writing." Encounter [London] 45.1 (1975): 40–51.
  

  Describes American writing generally in the 1970's, and makes passing reference to Bellow in the general context of many writers and influences.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Liberal and Existential Imaginations: The 1940s and 1950s." The Modern American Novel. New ed. New York: Viking, 1993. 169–75.
  

  Discusses Bellow in the context of the forces which shaped American social and literary history during the 1940s and 1950s. Suggests that the post-40s novel, including Bellow's works, abandoned the large mythic themes of the early moderns, engaged in moral uncertainty and metaphysical complexity, was more alienated than its European counterparts, and was shaped in a dark, post-Holocaust era shaken by evil. Sees Bellow exploring the place of the individual as beneficiary or exile who suffers urban anonymity, behavioral indifference, and the totalitarian massing of social force. Also comments on the rich Jewish humanism and the heritage of European philosophical thought which shapes most of his heroes, who are also heirs of modernist romanticism. Comments on how each of the books published in these two decades reflects the decade in which it was written. Sees DM as a struggle between determinism and humanism, and AAM, SD, and HRK, as more ebullient and picaresque. Sees H as exploring the notion of modern selfhood in the 1960s, and MSP as a book about revolutionary consciousness, black power, florid romanticism, irrationalism and hyper-civilized Byzantine lunacy. HG deals with two generations of writers, while DD is about a man trying to reconcile social observation with astrophysical knowledge.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "'The Nightmare in Which I am Trying to Get a Good Night's Rest': Saul Bellow and Changing History." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum Voor Taal En Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. Symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) on 10–11 Dec. 1977. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow and Changing History" in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 129–46.
  

  Attempts to account for the dark places in the novels, and to detail Bellow's European appeal. Discusses also the ambiguous Bellow ending in light of the themes of darkness and the influence of European thinking in the novels. Concludes that the Bellow hero lives in a world where metaphysical measurements cannot be taken, yet where the mind insists that they be taken anyway.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow's Intellectual Heroes." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 33–39.
  

  Compares the prominence of Gyorgy Lukàcs to Bellow because he was an exemplary European intellectual who fought against the "leaking away of life into nothingness," who set his face against the Modern. Reviews Bellow's views of the modern and postmodern heroes in American fiction. Describes Bellow's protagonists as "heros in space" who, like Lukàcs' are distinctively flamboyant intellectuals burdened with the moral and philosophical duties of the thinking mind, and who are persistently in search of reality. Sees Bellow's writing over five decades as full of argumentative ideas, intellectual issues, conflicts of the tricky, inchoate half-century weighted with the heavy inheritance of romantic and modernist thought which now comes under to its close in a new post-Marxist era of its ideological and mental uncertainty. Compares Claudio Magris' account of the anguish of Lukàcs' trip down the Danube with Bellow's heroes also trying to find an answer to dissolution. Concludes that rereading Bellow for his seventy-fifth birthday he has set out on his own Danubian voyage with more than literary-critical interest, since he too is trying to write a novel about European intellectual existence in the world beyond Marx and Lukàcs, a novel about a time when the great ideological preconceptions that guided much of the century have truly come apart, and when a vast mental reorganization is now due. Pays tribute to Bellow's "vital and glorious guidance" in this project.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow and the Naturalist Tradition." Review of English Literature 4.4 (1963): 80–92.
  

  Links Bellow to the great Russian naturalists and identifies his subject matter primarily as the answer to the question "How should a good man live?" Sees the two early novels as controlled and oppressively moral. Sees the advent of AAM as a broadening out, even though it and subsequent novels are still concerned with Darwinian ideas, evolution and struggle.

• Bradbury, Malcolm. "Saul Bellow and the Nobel Prize." Journal of American Studies 11.1 (1977): 3–12.
  

  Praises the Nobel Prize committee for its choice of Saul Bellow as candidate for the award. Discusses the propensity of judges to award the prize to writers who deal in moral affirmations, and proceeds to justify the award to Bellow on these grounds and others. A useful thematic overview of the works concludes the article.

• Braem, Helmut M. "Der Weg Saul Bellows." Neue Rundschau 4 (1971): 742–752.
  

  Traces Bellow's development as a novelist of ideas from DM to MSP. Characterizes Bellow's protagonists as alienated academics who loathe academia, as outsiders whose conflicts with de-individualizing society teach them lessons in self-preservation, compassion and acceptance. Suggests that Bellow 'has broken with several American traditions, from Faulkner's naturalism to Hemingway's realism, projecting American literature into a new era, which Braem describes rather than defines. He sees Bellow's heroes as "dangling" between the two worlds of ideas and reality. Estranged from both, their estrangement is not a Marxist alienation but a voluntary self-denial for the sake of a higher social order. Searching for their place in the world, they encounter the world and themselves as suffering but compassionate—basically "content to be as is willed." They all share Bummidge's burden of "humanitas" and Sammler's somewhat sentimental strife for a "sanctified simplicity."

• Braham, Jeanne. "The Struggle at the Center: Dostoyevsky and Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 13–18.
  

  Briefly outlines Bellow's debt to Dostoyevsky and the Russian realists, and points out that while he obviously admires the Russians tremendously, his own fiction registers an attempt at transcendence which remains short of resolution? Like the Russian novelists, he would like to lead his protagonist away from the void, but instead he details all the road blocks. What happens in the Bellow novel is the undercutting of the protagonists' efforts in such a way that they mock his beliefs in transcendence. The fiction registers the value of the continuous process of ethical struggle—not religious questing. "Transcendence is a means not an end."

• Brauner, David. "Three Solemn Buffoons: Comedy as Alibi in Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 13.1 (1995): 64–82.
  

  Argues that even though Bellow is considered a comic writer, he is rarely funny, only elusively ironic, not much given to one-liners and gags, only occasionally satiric, not really given to fantasy, and neither Aristophanic or Aristotelian in his sense of humor. Traces this pattern of telling about the hero's sense of humor. Suggests Bellow's comedy arises from our being told about the heroes' senses of humor. Traces this pattern of telling about the hero's sense of humor through three buffoons: Herzog in H, Augie March in AAM, and Dr. Mosby in MM. Yet despite this these characters are mostly solemn, not witty, and through assuming postures of enlightened self-awareness, they reveal only the darkness of self-ignorance. In claiming the ability to laugh at others because they can laugh at themselves–using comedy as an alibi–they reveal the monstrous egoism of the solemn buffoon. Concludes by questioning the fairness of this and wonders if Bellow should be allowed to get away with it.

• Brodin, Pierre. "Saul Bellow." Continuateurs et Novateurs; Ecrivains americains d'aujourd'hui. Pierre Brodin. Paris: Debreise, 1973. 33–38.
  
  
• Bryant, Jerry H. "Ambiguity and Affirmation: The Moral Outlook." The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and its Intellectual Background. Jerry H. Bryant. New York: Free Press, 1970. 341–69.
  
  
• Buelens, Gert. "American-Jewish Narrative and Multicultural Society–Then and Now." Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Literature. Ed. Hans Bak. European Contributions to American Studies 23. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1993. 228–39.
  

  Provides a history of American-Jewish fiction from its roots in Eastern European culture of the 19th Century to its immigrant experiences in America's cities. What follows is an endless dynamics of ethnic construction and deconstruction. Bellow's fiction provides a monadic narrative center incorporating the dual American-European stance of the protagonist in such a way as to suggest the possibility of an imaginary wholeness. Rather than having to engage too much in the fallen world, Bellow's protagonists are allowed to withdraw into a rarified existence as monads enjoying wholeness of their own imaginary making. Focuses largely on MSP

• Buitenhuis, Peter. "A Corresponding Fabric: The Urban World of Saul Bellow." Costerus 8 (1973): 13–35.
  
  
• Bullock, C. J. "On the Marxist Criticism of the Contemporary Novel in the United States: A Re-Evaluation of Saul Bellow." Praxis 1.2 (1976): 189–98.
  

  Accuses modern criticism of failing to come to terms with the 'socio-historical specificity of the contemporary American novel. "The article then proceeds to a methodological exercise in Marxist criticism which takes the Bellow hero under consideration.

• Burgess, Anthony. "The Jew as American." Spectator 7 Oct. 1966: 455–56.
  

  In TV he seems to be playing a popular anti-semitic tune but with ambivalent counterpoint. Out of the hostile symbiosis of Albee and Leventhal these two attempt to define themselves as men, failing for the most part because of self-pity. Claims that Bellow is working the Death of a Salesman theme in his own terms. Applauds the concreteness of descriptive language with which Bellow clothes his ideas and abstractions.

• Burns, Robert. "The Urban Experience: The Novels of Saul Bellow." Dissent 24 (1969): 18–24.
  

  Bellow concerns himself with how a man surrounded and swallowed in "the bowels of the monster metropolis" can survive in spirit. Concludes that Bellow portrays such an environmental force as bounded and merely objective, while the human spirit is not thus bound and static.

• Ebon, Martin. "Saul Bellow: The Worldly Insight and Mystical Core of a Nobel Laureate." New Realities 1.1 (1977): 26–30.
  

  A brief and generalized article on the surface social structure and mystical core of Bellow's work. A useful thematic overview of the canon.

• Eiland, Howard. "Bellow's Crankiness." Chicago Review 32.4 (1981): 92–107.
  

  Claims that Bellow is a particular kind of crank with an acute sense of appropriate boundaries. Likewise, Joseph is also cranky and given to strange states. This strangeness signals a deep religious impulse. In Bellow it is actually a Jewish-American version of modernist dis-ease. With Nietzsche, he shares an obsessive distrust of bourgeoise self-fashioning, the cult of therapy and an excessive need to guard his individuality. Bellow's crankiness, and that of his protagonists, is the tragi-comic crankiness of the modern temper, which is grounded in ambivalence. This allegiance is divided between the claims of consciousness and spontaneity. Examines each successive protagonist for evidence of his temperament. Concludes that if Bellow portrays himself as a crank it is because he feels the rectifying pull of "axial lines" in spite of the "ambiguous dominion of the heart."

• Eisinger, Chester E. "Saul Bellow: Love and Identity." Accent 18.3 (1958): 179–203.
  

  Places Bellow within the historical context of post-war American society which is so inimical to the processes of the imagination. Then he proceeds to identify two major themes—love and identity—as Bellow's solution to either radical socialism or religious revival and conservatism. Asserts the essential Jewishness of Bellow's work and its debt to Yiddish folk literature and Hassidism as he develops the idea of joy central to the Bellow novel.

• Eisinger, Chester E. "Saul Bellow: Man Alive, Sustained by Love." Fiction of the Forties. Chester E. Eisinger. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963. 341–62.
  

  Claims that Bellow has provided a remarkable sense of his time in the novels, and that he is primarily concerned with the relationship of man to society. This is why Bellow sets himself and his protagonists up against the society around him. Explains Bellow's particular position with regard to fashionable alienation theory. Does not examine any one novel in depth.

• Elmen, Paul. "Bellow's Gift." Christian Century 24 Nov. 1976: 1033–36.
  

  A general tribute to Bellow, discussing his child-like sense of humor and play, his style, his philosophical interests, his men and women, his acceptance of life and his latest novel, and HG.

• Ebon, Martin. "Saul Bellow: The Worldly Insight and Mystical Core of a Nobel Laureate." New Realities 1.1 (1977): 26–30.
  

  A brief and generalized article on the surface social structure and mystical core of Bellow's work. A useful thematic overview of the canon.

• Eiland, Howard. "Bellow's Crankiness." Chicago Review 32.4 (1981): 92–107.
  

  Claims that Bellow is a particular kind of crank with an acute sense of appropriate boundaries. Likewise, Joseph is also cranky and given to strange states. This strangeness signals a deep religious impulse. In Bellow it is actually a Jewish-American version of modernist dis-ease. With Nietzsche, he shares an obsessive distrust of bourgeoise self-fashioning, the cult of therapy and an excessive need to guard his individuality. Bellow's crankiness, and that of his protagonists, is the tragi-comic crankiness of the modern temper, which is grounded in ambivalence. This allegiance is divided between the claims of consciousness and spontaneity. Examines each successive protagonist for evidence of his temperament. Concludes that if Bellow portrays himself as a crank it is because he feels the rectifying pull of "axial lines" in spite of the "ambiguous dominion of the heart."

• Eisinger, Chester E. "Saul Bellow: Love and Identity." Accent 18.3 (1958): 179–203.
  

  Places Bellow within the historical context of post-war American society which is so inimical to the processes of the imagination. Then he proceeds to identify two major themes—love and identity—as Bellow's solution to either radical socialism or religious revival and conservatism. Asserts the essential Jewishness of Bellow's work and its debt to Yiddish folk literature and Hassidism as he develops the idea of joy central to the Bellow novel.

• Eisinger, Chester E. "Saul Bellow: Man Alive, Sustained by Love." Fiction of the Forties. Chester E. Eisinger. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963. 341–62.
  

  Claims that Bellow has provided a remarkable sense of his time in the novels, and that he is primarily concerned with the relationship of man to society. This is why Bellow sets himself and his protagonists up against the society around him. Explains Bellow's particular position with regard to fashionable alienation theory. Does not examine any one novel in depth.

• Elmen, Paul. "Bellow's Gift." Christian Century 24 Nov. 1976: 1033–36.
  

  A general tribute to Bellow, discussing his child-like sense of humor and play, his style, his philosophical interests, his men and women, his acceptance of life and his latest novel, and HG.

• Da Re, Gianfranco. "Saul Bellow eil Mondo Dei Suoi Intellettuali lnquieti Letture: Libro e Spettacolo." Mensile di Studi e Rassegne 44. 455 (1989): 199–212.
  
  
• Davis, Robert Gorham. "The American Individualist Tradition." The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963. 111–41.
  

  An early essay on the struggle for identity within the Bellow novel. Makes useful comparisons with Styron. A good overview of the novels with regard to the plights of the central characters.

• Delbanco, Nicholas. "On Bellow." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 81–84.
  

  Describes his personal association with Bernard Malamud and his first meeting with Bellow at Malamud's dinner table, and provides a series of sample passages suggestive of Malamud's sustained appreciation of Bellow. Suggests that for Malamud, Bellow was both benchmark and mark, and hopes for further scholarly inquiry into this topic. Concludes that Bellows great achievement is to have produced not merely a voice, but a chorale.

• Dickstein, Morris. "Cold War Blues: Notes on the Culture of the Fifties." Partisan Review 41.1 (1974): 30–53.
  

  Provides a detailed description of American culture in the 1950's, the literary state of affairs, and a brief reference to Saul Bellow and his literary contemporaries.

• Dickstein, Morris. "For Art's Sake." Partisan Review 33.4 (1966): 617–21.
  

  Describes Bellow's address at a recent P.E.N. meeting in which he indicts literary critics and teachers of literature. Finds Bellow's acrimony over the literary establishiment somewhat ironic as well as worthy of serious attention. Criticizes the deficiencies of the speech and its tendency to dichotomize history as a Manichean struggle between artists and critics for possession of the Word, a struggle which Bellow seems to characterize as a contest between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

• Dommergues, Pierre. L'Alienation dans le roman americain contemporain. Vol. 1. Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1977. 355–429. 2 vols. 1976–77. [In French]
  
  
• Dougherty, David C. "Finding Before Seeking: Themes in Henderson the Rain King and Humboldt's Gift." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 93–101.
  

  Bellow's characters frequently discover aphorisms which, if properly comprehended, help them to understand and shape their lives. Charlie Citrine cherishes a sentence from a book by Valery that Humboldt lent him: "Trouve avant chercher" [ "Finding before seeking"], which says a great deal about Bellow's comic vision in general, as well as about this novel; it becomes the key to the structure of HG. Dougherty goes on to point out how Bellow's paradoxical comic vision is symbolized by this aphorism as Charlie learns to cease actively seeking for meaning in life and to reverse his expectations.

• Dresner, Samuel H. "The Jewish Bellow Reconsidered." Midstream June/July 1996: 33–36.
  

  Calls Bellow a man with an identity problem given his long history of embracing and rejecting the label "Jewish," and all forms of parochiality in favor of "universal" writer. Argues, nevertheless, that by 1963 he is coming to terms with his Jewishness, and that by the time he has published TJB he is dealing very seriously with this. Suggests that on the twentieth anniversary of the publication this seminal book of the ongoing crisis of Bellow's Jewish self-definition, it is fitting to point out its brilliant vignettes of famous and ordinary people, its beautiful descriptions of land, and its brilliant style. Suggests that in his later years Bellow has discovered not only the land of Israel and its energy, but that being a universal writer means that you must draw out of your own traditions with pride and understanding. Concludes that the goal for Bellow and other writers is to reinvent civilization, and not to see ones Jewishness as narrowness, but as a glory and a blessing for all.

• Dresner, Samuel H. "Letters to the Editor." Midstream Nov./Dec. 1996: 43–44. A response to Pierre Ferrand's letter.
  

  Discusses Samuel Dresner's essay "The Jewish Bellow Reconsidered" and argues that the fact that Bellow refused for many years to be called a Jewish writer is Dresner's problem. Describes Bellow's serious treatment of antisemitism beginning as far back as 1949, and insists that this kind of cultural identification with Yiddishness and Jewishness inhabits all of the books from AAM on. Also quarrels with Dresner's proposition that Jewish writers have a special moral and religious duty, and with Dresner's castigation of Bellow for his dismissal of Meyer, and Levin's Zionism.

• Da Re, Gianfranco. "Saul Bellow eil Mondo Dei Suoi Intellettuali lnquieti Letture: Libro e Spettacolo." Mensile di Studi e Rassegne 44. 455 (1989): 199–212.
  
  
• Davis, Robert Gorham. "The American Individualist Tradition." The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963. 111–41.
  

  An early essay on the struggle for identity within the Bellow novel. Makes useful comparisons with Styron. A good overview of the novels with regard to the plights of the central characters.

• Delbanco, Nicholas. "On Bellow." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 81–84.
  

  Describes his personal association with Bernard Malamud and his first meeting with Bellow at Malamud's dinner table, and provides a series of sample passages suggestive of Malamud's sustained appreciation of Bellow. Suggests that for Malamud, Bellow was both benchmark and mark, and hopes for further scholarly inquiry into this topic. Concludes that Bellows great achievement is to have produced not merely a voice, but a chorale.

• Dickstein, Morris. "Cold War Blues: Notes on the Culture of the Fifties." Partisan Review 41.1 (1974): 30–53.
  

  Provides a detailed description of American culture in the 1950's, the literary state of affairs, and a brief reference to Saul Bellow and his literary contemporaries.

• Dickstein, Morris. "For Art's Sake." Partisan Review 33.4 (1966): 617–21.
  

  Describes Bellow's address at a recent P.E.N. meeting in which he indicts literary critics and teachers of literature. Finds Bellow's acrimony over the literary establishiment somewhat ironic as well as worthy of serious attention. Criticizes the deficiencies of the speech and its tendency to dichotomize history as a Manichean struggle between artists and critics for possession of the Word, a struggle which Bellow seems to characterize as a contest between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

• Dommergues, Pierre. L'Alienation dans le roman americain contemporain. Vol. 1. Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1977. 355–429. 2 vols. 1976–77. [In French]
  
  
• Dougherty, David C. "Finding Before Seeking: Themes in Henderson the Rain King and Humboldt's Gift." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 93–101.
  

  Bellow's characters frequently discover aphorisms which, if properly comprehended, help them to understand and shape their lives. Charlie Citrine cherishes a sentence from a book by Valery that Humboldt lent him: "Trouve avant chercher" [ "Finding before seeking"], which says a great deal about Bellow's comic vision in general, as well as about this novel; it becomes the key to the structure of HG. Dougherty goes on to point out how Bellow's paradoxical comic vision is symbolized by this aphorism as Charlie learns to cease actively seeking for meaning in life and to reverse his expectations.

• Dresner, Samuel H. "The Jewish Bellow Reconsidered." Midstream June/July 1996: 33–36.
  

  Calls Bellow a man with an identity problem given his long history of embracing and rejecting the label "Jewish," and all forms of parochiality in favor of "universal" writer. Argues, nevertheless, that by 1963 he is coming to terms with his Jewishness, and that by the time he has published TJB he is dealing very seriously with this. Suggests that on the twentieth anniversary of the publication this seminal book of the ongoing crisis of Bellow's Jewish self-definition, it is fitting to point out its brilliant vignettes of famous and ordinary people, its beautiful descriptions of land, and its brilliant style. Suggests that in his later years Bellow has discovered not only the land of Israel and its energy, but that being a universal writer means that you must draw out of your own traditions with pride and understanding. Concludes that the goal for Bellow and other writers is to reinvent civilization, and not to see ones Jewishness as narrowness, but as a glory and a blessing for all.

• Dresner, Samuel H. "Letters to the Editor." Midstream Nov./Dec. 1996: 43–44. A response to Pierre Ferrand's letter.
  

  Discusses Samuel Dresner's essay "The Jewish Bellow Reconsidered" and argues that the fact that Bellow refused for many years to be called a Jewish writer is Dresner's problem. Describes Bellow's serious treatment of antisemitism beginning as far back as 1949, and insists that this kind of cultural identification with Yiddishness and Jewishness inhabits all of the books from AAM on. Also quarrels with Dresner's proposition that Jewish writers have a special moral and religious duty, and with Dresner's castigation of Bellow for his dismissal of Meyer, and Levin's Zionism.

• Gallagher, Michael Paul. "Bellow's Clowns and Contemplatives." Month Apr. 1977: 131–34.
  

  Argues that Bcllow's clowns are "heroes of crowded consciousness, not intellectuals whom we are meant to take seriously as such." Describes them as caught up in the culture chatter that passes for knowledge. However, finding this is such a source of despair, they then seek for real knowledge.

• Gállego, Cándido Pérez. "Saul Bellow: Las aventuras de Saul Bellow." El héro solitario en la novela norteamericana. Madrid: Prensa, Espa ola, 1966. 179–212.
  
  
• Galloway, David D. "The Absurd Man as Picaro: The Novels of Saul Bellow." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6.2 (1964): 226–54. Rpt. in Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger. David D. Galloway. Austin: U of Texas P, 1966. 82–139. Rev. ed. 1970.
  

  A very detailed article based on the observation that modern writers after Camus have used the myth of the absurd man and produced a modern version of the picaresque novel. Applies this to Bellow's novels in a careful analysis. Concentrates largely on AAM. Concludes that it is this application of the absurd and the picaresque that provides the distinguishing feature of hope in the Bellow novel. A major article.

• Galloway, David D. "Clown and Saint: The Hero in Current American Fiction." Critique 7.3 (1965): 46–65.
  

  Traces the development of the urban landscape and technology in the American consciousness as a backdrop for discussion of Bellow's urban landscapes. Emphasizes the challenge such a landscape presents for the twentieth-century city dweller. Two types emerge in the novel, representative of the human attempt to resist the dissipation inherent in such a life-style—the clown and the saint. Sees Augie March as a philosophical clown, along with Henderson. Sees them also as contemporary saints of sensibility who wage the battle of the spirit in a world of curtailed expectation, "threading the increasingly narrow path around suicide and despair toward a refurbished vision of man."

• Galloway, David D. "Culture-Making: The Recent Works of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum voof Taal-en Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussei, 1978. 49–60. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) on 10–11 Dec. 1977.
  

  Argues that while Bellow has successfully domesticated the novel of ideas in the U.S., and countered the WASP irony of philosophy and science, European intellections, and other materials with a God older than that worshipped by the pilgrim fathers, his variety is illusory. Bellow elaborates repeated characters, themes, parallels, motifs and expressions throughout the novels. Galloway then details the successive bankruptcy of Bellow's imagination from MSP onward. . Finally, he accuses Bellow of constructing thin plots, of presenting ideas instead of literature, of creating weak characters, and of manifesting a marked disinterest in formal experimentation.

• Geismar, Maxwell. "The Jewish Heritage in Contemporary American Fiction." Ramparts 2.2 (1963): 5–13.
  
  
• Geismar, Maxwell. "Saul Bellow: Novelist of the Intellectuals." American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. Maxwell Geismar. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958. 210–24.
  

  Sees Bellow as a member of an intellectual and moral caste who has fought all his life to struggle out of that caste, to go beyond it, and to write fiction in spite of it. Sees within Bellow "a deep and primary core of Jewish feeling and of biblical righteousness" which defeats some of his efforts at neat intellectual synthesis. Treats the novels up to SD chronologically. Concludes by comparing Bellow to Crane, since he claims both were "consumed in the flames of [their] own oedipal and religious conflicts."

• Gibson, Walker. "Free-Style: The Rhetoric of Unreliable Narrators.'' Tough, Sweet and Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles. Walker Gibson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1966. 59–63.
  

  A simple discussion of prose style in Bellow, but one of the only exclusive treatments of style in the secondary literature. Attempts to place Bellow historically. Concentrates mostly on AAM.

• Gindin, James. "The Fable Begins to Break Down." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8.1 (1967): 1–18.
  

  Briefly traces the development of fabulation in mid-sixties British and American fiction. Places Bellow's letter writing device in H in the category of mythic exploration of human possibilities. Describes use of fable in HRK also.

• Gindin, James. "Saul Bellow." Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion. James Gindin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1971. 305–36.
  

  Provides a general overview of the novels up to MSP, discussing Bellow's protagonists in terms of WW II existentialism and the prevailing model of the a-hero or anti-hero. Concentrates largely on the remarkable degree of communication each of the protagonists achieves within the novels despite the alienated condition of each.

• Girgus, Sam B. "After the Sixties: The Continuing Search." The Law of the Heart: Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature. Sam B. Girgus. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. 140–50.
  

  Discusses MSP as a book in which the protagonist protests perverted forms of individuality. Shows how this novel and the others offer a program for individualism that stands in strong contrast to the idea of "selfishness as a fierce moral idea."

• Gitenstein, Barbara. "Saul Bellow and the Yiddish Literary Tradition." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PAl 5.2 (1979): 24–46. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  

  Argues that, along with the influence of French, Russian and English literary models, Bellow, by virtue of his upbringing, was influenced by Yiddish models. Then proceeds to provide both a general introduction to the conventions of Yiddish literature and a series of brief applications to the Bellow canon. Among the conventions analyzed are Bellow's particular humor, the mock heroic elements, Jewish humanism, picaresque conventions, monologue, didacticism, authorial intrusion, realism, and numerous character types.

• Gitenstein, Barbara. "Saul Bellow of the 1970's and the Contemporary Use of History in Jewish–American Literature." Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 7–17.
  

  Argues that in the 1970's a number of Jewish writers made the choice of history for the outline of art, and the choice of historical events to validate personal values. Of these, Saul Bellow is the most successful in transforming the facts of history into the art of fiction. In a close study of his novels, the reader can see strong parallels between his "Enlightenment" views of history in art and nineteenth-century American ideals. Illustrates Bellow's thesis that art borrows from fact only what it needs. Gives a detailed account of the use of "facts" in HG. Concludes this thorough exegesis by suggesting that a major theme of the novel is that the individual poet must be in time, but should not be overwhelmed by fact and history. If he is, he will lose his ironic distance from the detail; he will be unable to feel dream-states. Jewish-American writers of the 1970's seem unable to overlook the impact of history on life and art; they try to explain the meaning of being in America in the second half of the twentieth-century through a factual base in history.

• Glaysher, Frederick. "A Poet Looks at Saul Bellow's Soul." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 43–55.
  

  Suggests that Bellow is one of the few American writers to remember that man is a soul, not a mere conglomeration of social conditionings. Describes Bellow as a modern soul set free from a traditional Judeo-Christian or Eastern religious past, but which is hungry, seeking, longing for its rightful home. Describes how against a background of collapsing Western and Eastern religions of the world Bellow lines up firmly on the side of spiritual, Platonic and Augustinian belief in the soul, and a sense of God. Concludes that Bellow's fiction, though it stands free of all traditional religious accoutrements, and ever more free of the cliches of modernism, nevertheless attests to an open channel to the soul, to the deepest part of ourselves.

• Glenday, Michael K. "Some Versions of the Real: The Novellas of Saul Bellow." The Modern American Novella. Ed. Robert A. Lee. New York: St. Martin's London: Visions, 1989. 162–77. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 189–204.
  

  Argues that the very intensity and concentration of the novella form prevents Bellow's metaphysical garrulity and accentuates the common theme that runs through them all—the call to retrieve reality. With its sharp cutting edge it has served Bellow as a sharp tool enabling him to discover enduring cognitions of reality in its more localized forms, especially the urban killing fields of Chicago. Flails SD as a searing condemnation of American reality. Details Tommy's awful day, culminating in Tommy's communion with humankind among the mourners. Describes how Tommy reaches beyond the reality of appearances, beyond Tamkins and Perls and Adlers. Suggests that this novella contains some of Bellow's best writing. "What Kind of Day did you have" consolidates this vision of American reality. Concludes that, like Tommy Wilhelm, these innocents are the misfits without reality in a world of distorted forms. Both novellas are powerful examinations of the extent to which Americans collaborate in this process and which speak of soul.

• Golden, Daniel. "Mystical Musings and Comic Confrontations: The Fiction of Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler." Essays on Canadian Writing 22 (1981): 62–85.
  

  Given the closeness of their immigrant and orthodox roots, the two writers offer instructive contrasts in some of the aspirations and contrasts inherent in American and Canadian Jewish experience. Goes on to compare and contrast both writers in terms of their ethnic backgrounds, search for identity, allegiances, treatment of assimilation themes and comic gifts. Suggests that both writers document the larger plight of mankind and their respective cultures. Both share the ghetto landscape of memory. Both are fascinated with petty crooks, hustlers, and luftmenschen. Both write of legitimate and not-so-legitimate business. Bellow is more mystical and Richler more humorous in response to experience. Contains an excellent discussion of Bellow's utilization of the occult to mediate the failure of intellect and rationality.

• Goldman, Arnold. "A Remnant to Escape: The American Writer and the Minority Group." American Literature Since 1900. Ed. Marcus Cunliffe. History of Literature in the English Language 9. London: Barrie, 1975. 312–43.
  
  
• Goldman, Liela H. "The Holocaust in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Modern Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 71–80.
  

  Describes Bellow's statement on the subject of the Holocaust in terms of his analysis of the misguided Romantic origins of German culture, which in turn gave rise to the phenomenon of Nazism. Goldman sees Nazism as an attack on Western Humanism and characterizes Bellow's novelistic processes of thought as consistently Jewish in their defense of humanistic philosophy. Discusses miso-Germanism in terms of specific Bellow characters throughout the novels and in terms of Bellow's critique of German philosophers responsible for the philosophical bases of German Romanticism.

• Goldman, L. H. "The Jewish Perspective of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lange, 1992. 3–19.
  

  Asserts that Bellow's writings epitomize the moral vision that is an integral part of the Jewish outlook and that it functions on two levels: (1) the conscious, the material that he chooses as an integral part of the his fiction–characters, themes, relationships, etc.; and (2) the unconscious, the Judaism that was ingrained into his psyche as a child and has remained as a perspective throughout his more mature years. In this latter category falls the general philosophy that permeates his work and his attitudes towards people, life, and the universe. Concludes that the quality of Bellow's Jewishness is incontrovertible and that throughout his oeuvre, which comprises his "song of songs," his humanistic voice intones the anthropocentric concerns of his heritage.

• Goldman, Liela H. "Saul Bellow and the Philosophy of Judaism." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 81-95.
  

  Briefly defines Judaism as an ethical, bible-centered monotheism which is fundamentally anthropocentric and which provides reasons for man's existence based on assumptions of human confidence and sufficiency. Within this context Goldman develops the thesis that Bellow is first and foremost Jewish in his philosophy, based as it is on a definable ethical monotheism. Clearly, Bellow believes in a hierarchic universe in which man is created in the image of God with his place a little lower than the angels.

• Goldman, Liela H. "'Shuffling Out of My Vulgar Origins': The Masculinist-Elitist Language of Saul Bellow's Fiction." Melus 16.1 (1989-90): 33-42.
  

  Points out Bellow's sensitivity to language, mastery of several languages, and conscious break with WASP language. Examines his use of Yiddish language conventions, which she insists are equivocal in that Bellow wants to become part of the burgeoning field of American-Jewish literature, (plus its intellectuals) as well as part of an elitist group that transcends this category. Comments on Jewish reliance on verbal power and eloquence as reflected in the characters, and their simultaneous inaction. Points out classist differences between the uses of Yiddish employed by primary and secondary characters through use of the colloquial and the vernacular Yiddish. Shows how Bellow deliberately ascribes certain linguistic skills to his male characters while denying them to his female characters, thus perpetuating the East European sex/class bias. Accuses Bellow of using masculine elitist Yiddish and Yinglish of a vulgar nature while preserving Anglo-Saxon fastidiousness. Concludes that Yiddish was Bellow's Mamaloshen and that he heard it and spoke it before all other languages.

• Goldman, Liela. "Thirty Years of Bellowmania: Saul Bellow's Equivocality as a Jewish-American Writer." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and P. Shiv Kumar. 1983.
  

  Argues that the ambiguity of response to Bellow's novels is matched by his own ambiguity as an American-Jewish writer who won't be labeled as a Jewish writer. Bellow's literature is humanitarian in outlook, positive in perspective, and concerned with freedom of choice, social responsibility, and human dignity. Yet although this world view is Jewish, it lacks the awareness of major historical events, and is a representation directed to a non-Jewish audience. The strain is caused by the strain of his indecisive Jewishness as he sits atop the citadel of WASP achievement. Furthermore, his heroes are Jewish by default and none seem to discuss current historical moments of import to Jews. His avoidance of such a protagonist seems deliberate. The Gentile community notes that his protagonists are Jewish while his Jewish readers woud prefer more specifically Jewish content.

• Goldsmith, Arnold L. "A 'Curse on Columbus': Twentieth Century Jewish-American Fiction and the Theme of Disillusionment." Studies in American Jewish Literature [UniversityPark, PA]5.2 (1979): 47-55. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  
  
• Gollin, Rita K. "Understanding Fathers in American Jewish Fiction." Centennial Review 18.3 (1974): 273-87.
  

  Argues that even a weak Jewish father is capable of passing on the understanding of compassion and comprehension of human limits even when he has failed to master his traditional role as Jewish father. Hence, the Jewish father "remains at the moral center of Jewish fiction." Discusses Asa Leventhal in TV. Asa must, like many Jewish males, "learn to be a father unlike his own." Discusses also H and MSP in terms of these types of fathers.

• Gonzalez Gonzalez, Francisco Javier. "Saul Bellow: Entre el Modernism y el Postmodernismo." Seccion Departamental de Logrono. Actas de las I Jornadas de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana. Logrono: Pubs del Colegio U de Logrono, 1990. 35-40.
  
  
• Goodman, Oscar. "Among Gentiles." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and P. Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 108-24.
  

  Offers an introductory demonstration of how an open cultural approach to Bellow's Jewish heritage elucidates major signs in his novels that might otherwise remain obscure. Focuses on the influence of Bellow's Jewish milieu, religious and secular, along with the general sense of historic Judaism, the east European shtetl traditions, the confrontation of immigrant urban communities and the dominant American culture. Argues that Bellow's novels are about Diaspora, primarily about his perceptions as a son of immigrant jews, his interest in Hasidism, and his responses to alienation. Concludes that the axial lines of his work are Jewish.

• Gordon, Andrew. "Acting and Authenticity in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 137-58.
  

  Takes the metaphor "bad acting" and bad actors used so frequently in Bellow's texts as having two related senses in Bellow's work: first, a poor or unconvincing theatrical performance; and second, bad conduct–lying and deceit; sexual misbehavior, crime, filth, sin and evil. Although his heroes often deplore the theater and acting as false, sinful, or criminal, they are repeatedly drawn to it and get taken in by figurative "bad actors." The heroes are sometimes amused by bad actors, sometimes feel superior to them, but often grow furious at them. Traces Bellow's own attractions and ambivalences to actors, acting, and the theater, as well as those of each of the novels. Concludes that Bellow, like Charlie Citrine, has abandoned the theater but that he did write one of those one-act plays and had a play on Broadway, The Last Analysis. Describes the hero of that play, Bummidge, as a broken-down vaudevillian with intellectual pretensions who stages, for his therapy and our entertainment, a philosophical farce, a vaudeville of the mind. Concludes that this too in the "last analysis" is what Saul Bellow as novelist has staged for us as readers.

• Gordon, Andrew. "The Ancient Mariner, and Other Encounters with Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 57-66.
  
  
• Gordon, Andrew. "The Hero as Sucker in Saul Bellow's Early Fiction." Saul Bellow Journal 6.2 (1987): 47-63.
  

  Explains Bellow's use of the terms suckerfish, sucker, and succor and how they are related not only by sound, but also by their unconscious sense. Argues that they are all connected to the Bellow hero's emotional dilemma, which revolves around problems of oral passivity and dependency. Provides limited discussion on the protagonists in DM, SD, and two short stories, "A Father to Be" and "Leaving the Yellow House."

• Grace, Nancy M. "Beyond the Mask of Silence: Saul Bellow and the Feminized Male." The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth Century Literature. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1995. 193-230.
  

  Discusses Bellow's break with the Hemingway "code" in his production of heroes who yearn to express themselves, and who ruminate constantly about their fears and pains. Suggests that ost readers stop short of calling them "feminine" and how Bellow reshapes his feminine heroes constantly by showing them locked in culture-bound conflicts. Traces this through each of the novels from the corrupted psyche of Tommy Wilhelm to the reversal of negative male femininity in Henderson. Aruges that Africa stands for Henderson's feminine while Charlie Citring is portrayed as a distinctly feminine character who, far from lacking a quest, simply wants consciousness and the right to be rather than become. Provides a lengthy disquisition on Charles' feminine virtues, and by comparing him with all of the other male characters he encounters. Ultimately argues that Charlie wishes to strip off much of his male mask and recover the sentimental feelings of his Jewish childhood. Discusses his engagement in masculine thought and competitive male relationships in which other men seem to know what they want. Traces Charlie's progressive exit from masculine forums and entry into meditative states. The Charlie who leaves the cemetery at the end of the novel notes the spring flowers blooming in the midst of death is a man who has begun to acknowledge his feelings. A major article.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Bellow's Canadian Beginnings." Saul Bellow Journal 7.1 (1988): 27-34.
  

  Discusses Bellow's Montreal multilingual childhood with its physical environs and the impact of these influences on the novels. Traces references to both, throughout DM and H in particular.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Bellow's Hand Writing: The Tactile Imagination." English Studies in Canada 21.4 (1995): 457-69. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 77-90.
  

  Claims that what makes Saul Bellow's fiction so all-encompassing is his blending of physical details of Chicago's underworld with the metaphysics of European philosophy. To mediate between the extremes of abstraction and the concrete Bellow relies on the sense of touch to examine the many channels and avenues of his characters' universe. His emphasis on the tactile is the hallmark of his fiction as characters grope for higher meaning while exploring the sensory pleasures of the quotation; on the one hand, the higher reaches of thought; on the other, the reality of the American streets paved with fools' gold. Concludes that of the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx outfit, Saul Bellow nimbly stitches the very fabric and texture of fiction, where the first to knock on second thought has the last laugh.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Bellow and Anthropology." Saul Bellow Journal 14:2 (1996): 17-27.
  

  Points out that Bellow's most telling observation on the subject of anthropology appears in "Cousins," where he speculates directly on the subject of Jews and anthropology. Suggests that Bellow might have been influenced by Victor Turner, a member of the famous Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Turner, after all, spent a lifetime researching the ritual processes of various tribal initiation rites and rites of passage in particular. Traces the tripartite pattern established by Turner: 1) preliminary, 2) liminal, 3) postliminary, with the liminary stage as the most important. Applies this paradigm to AAM and HRK. Concludes that Bellow, in his liminality, features a direct ascent into transcendence, and settles for the weave of the text where tactile and textile intersect. This is a place where he combines high and low metaphysics and comedy, the sublime and the subliminal, margin and center, anthropology and archeology, communitas and liminality. Concludes that while anthropology provides a model for the metonymic juxtaposition of humanity, Bellow's imagination provides the metaphoric thrust to go beyond the physicality of metonymy toward metaleptic and metaphysical spheres.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Breaking the Mosaid Code: Jewish Literature vs. the Law." Mosaic 27.3 (1994): 87-106.
  

  A major treatment of several writers whose key works demonstrate the idea of literature versus the law, or law versus midrashic commentary by rabbis and writers, a literature which engages in intergeneric, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary exceptions to the law and its autochthons. Deals at length with Freud's supplanting of Moses as lawgiver in Moses and Monotheism, then treats similar maneuvers in Kafka's The Trial, Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, in the works of S. Y. Agnon, in A. M. Klein's The Second Scroll, and lastly, in Bellow's H. Sees Herzog as the lawgiver who refuses to be given laws in this American system. Describes how Bellow develops the law-and-literature symbiosis between Herzog and Simkin–a man he pities as he simultaneously pokes fun at the Herzogs and Simkins of the world who are alternately full of tendentious tendencies and highbrow avoidance of realism. Notes also how through corrective irony Bellow mediates a position wherein if the law turns cruel, literary realism must restore the balance in favor of humanity. Details Herzog's relationships with his other lawyers–Sandor Himmelstein in particular–who offers him only cruel advice and cowardly potato love. Describes Herzog's firsthand experience of the playing out of authority and degeneracy, which in the person of the terrible Dickensian magistrate are one and the same. Concludes that through Herzog we see that law and literature have a similar currency in Bellow's grasp of truth, honor, and realism. Bellow's dualism incorporates the underbelly of criminality with abstract ideas of law and justice–"Nastiness in the transcendent position."

• Gross, Theodore L. "Saul Bellow: The Victim and the Hero." The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. Theodore L. Gross. New York: Free Press, 1971. 243-61.
  

  In the context of a chapter entitled: "The Quixotic Hero," Gross suggests that unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Bellow has involuntarily favored the more conforming or melioristic side of the question of idealism or nihilism. In Bellow's work the hero has become an Americanized fusion of Dostoevsky's Underground Man and Kafka's Joseph K., not so much a victim of external authority as of his own weaknesses, someone who has forced himself out of that society. Their condition is suffering toward love.

• Grossman, Edward. "The Bitterness of Saul Bellow." Midstream 16.7 (1970): 3-15.
  

  Comments that all of Bellow's protagonists suffer from more than their fair share of temperament. Mr. Sammler suffers from the same ailment, and, like others, refuses to throw over his illusions about goodness. Provides a general appraisal of the novel focusing on a variety of elements. Condemns Bellow for his skepticism and concludes, "If the most respected and intelligent novelist of the Establishment has only this to say about us, why bother with other more profound and disturbing things he has to say about America."

• Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. "Saul Bellow: Inward and Upward, Past Distraction." Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel—Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 120-45.
  

  Argues that Bellow didn't start out by writing progress novels because he did not like aging past boyhood. Sees his history as a writer of progress novels as a curious, interrupted one, which finally focuses on the middle years. Divides his treatment of the midlife novel into the following categories: (1) Crises of Aging, (2) Victim Literature, (3) The Three Volume Cure, (4) Phenomenal Woman, (5) Phenomenal Man, (6) The Comic Surprise, and (7) Late Starters, Slower Learners, Eager Happy Beginners. Concludes that like our other bildungsromanciers, Bellow has found a way to rescue the state of happy anticipation from its literary connections with youth-on-the-threshold-of-life and restore it to the middle years. Calls this midlife progress narrative a deeply reverential form which makes a good wish for its readers: that people of all ages might live so.

• Gunn, Drewey Wayne. American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973. Austin: U of Texas P, 1974. 204-08.
  
  
• Guttmann, Allen. "Mr. Bellow's America." The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. Allen Guttmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. 178-22.
  

  Discusses each of the novels up to MSP under the heading of its own title. Concentrates on the twin ideas of Jewish assimilation and the quest for identity in each case, treating the protagonists as marginal men, as Jews and as typical urban Americans. A major chapter.

• Guttmann, ,&lien. "Saul Bellow's Humane Comedy." Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978. 127-51.
  

  Argues that Bellow's chief subject is the mind's comical struggle with ideas. Begins with some brief references to Bummidge in LA. In this major article on Bellow and the comic artist, Guttmann reviews each of the novels in turn. In the course of this exhaustive analysis he discusses sources, influences, and style of humor. He also discusses ideas, philosophy, characters, and the language of humor itself. Guttmann's overriding thesis is the essential humanity of the comic vision in Bellow. Concludes that the comic triumphs of HRK, H, and MSP have not been equalled in the later fiction.

• Gallagher, Michael Paul. "Bellow's Clowns and Contemplatives." Month Apr. 1977: 131–34.
  

  Argues that Bcllow's clowns are "heroes of crowded consciousness, not intellectuals whom we are meant to take seriously as such." Describes them as caught up in the culture chatter that passes for knowledge. However, finding this is such a source of despair, they then seek for real knowledge.

• Gállego, Cándido Pérez. "Saul Bellow: Las aventuras de Saul Bellow." El héro solitario en la novela norteamericana. Madrid: Prensa, Espa ola, 1966. 179–212.
  
  
• Galloway, David D. "The Absurd Man as Picaro: The Novels of Saul Bellow." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6.2 (1964): 226–54. Rpt. in Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger. David D. Galloway. Austin: U of Texas P, 1966. 82–139. Rev. ed. 1970.
  

  A very detailed article based on the observation that modern writers after Camus have used the myth of the absurd man and produced a modern version of the picaresque novel. Applies this to Bellow's novels in a careful analysis. Concentrates largely on AAM. Concludes that it is this application of the absurd and the picaresque that provides the distinguishing feature of hope in the Bellow novel. A major article.

• Galloway, David D. "Clown and Saint: The Hero in Current American Fiction." Critique 7.3 (1965): 46–65.
  

  Traces the development of the urban landscape and technology in the American consciousness as a backdrop for discussion of Bellow's urban landscapes. Emphasizes the challenge such a landscape presents for the twentieth-century city dweller. Two types emerge in the novel, representative of the human attempt to resist the dissipation inherent in such a life-style—the clown and the saint. Sees Augie March as a philosophical clown, along with Henderson. Sees them also as contemporary saints of sensibility who wage the battle of the spirit in a world of curtailed expectation, "threading the increasingly narrow path around suicide and despair toward a refurbished vision of man."

• Galloway, David D. "Culture-Making: The Recent Works of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum voof Taal-en Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussei, 1978. 49–60. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) on 10–11 Dec. 1977.
  

  Argues that while Bellow has successfully domesticated the novel of ideas in the U.S., and countered the WASP irony of philosophy and science, European intellections, and other materials with a God older than that worshipped by the pilgrim fathers, his variety is illusory. Bellow elaborates repeated characters, themes, parallels, motifs and expressions throughout the novels. Galloway then details the successive bankruptcy of Bellow's imagination from MSP onward. . Finally, he accuses Bellow of constructing thin plots, of presenting ideas instead of literature, of creating weak characters, and of manifesting a marked disinterest in formal experimentation.

• Geismar, Maxwell. "The Jewish Heritage in Contemporary American Fiction." Ramparts 2.2 (1963): 5–13.
  
  
• Geismar, Maxwell. "Saul Bellow: Novelist of the Intellectuals." American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. Maxwell Geismar. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958. 210–24.
  

  Sees Bellow as a member of an intellectual and moral caste who has fought all his life to struggle out of that caste, to go beyond it, and to write fiction in spite of it. Sees within Bellow "a deep and primary core of Jewish feeling and of biblical righteousness" which defeats some of his efforts at neat intellectual synthesis. Treats the novels up to SD chronologically. Concludes by comparing Bellow to Crane, since he claims both were "consumed in the flames of [their] own oedipal and religious conflicts."

• Gibson, Walker. "Free-Style: The Rhetoric of Unreliable Narrators.'' Tough, Sweet and Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles. Walker Gibson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1966. 59–63.
  

  A simple discussion of prose style in Bellow, but one of the only exclusive treatments of style in the secondary literature. Attempts to place Bellow historically. Concentrates mostly on AAM.

• Gindin, James. "The Fable Begins to Break Down." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8.1 (1967): 1–18.
  

  Briefly traces the development of fabulation in mid-sixties British and American fiction. Places Bellow's letter writing device in H in the category of mythic exploration of human possibilities. Describes use of fable in HRK also.

• Gindin, James. "Saul Bellow." Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion. James Gindin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1971. 305–36.
  

  Provides a general overview of the novels up to MSP, discussing Bellow's protagonists in terms of WW II existentialism and the prevailing model of the a-hero or anti-hero. Concentrates largely on the remarkable degree of communication each of the protagonists achieves within the novels despite the alienated condition of each.

• Girgus, Sam B. "After the Sixties: The Continuing Search." The Law of the Heart: Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature. Sam B. Girgus. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. 140–50.
  

  Discusses MSP as a book in which the protagonist protests perverted forms of individuality. Shows how this novel and the others offer a program for individualism that stands in strong contrast to the idea of "selfishness as a fierce moral idea."

• Gitenstein, Barbara. "Saul Bellow and the Yiddish Literary Tradition." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PAl 5.2 (1979): 24–46. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  

  Argues that, along with the influence of French, Russian and English literary models, Bellow, by virtue of his upbringing, was influenced by Yiddish models. Then proceeds to provide both a general introduction to the conventions of Yiddish literature and a series of brief applications to the Bellow canon. Among the conventions analyzed are Bellow's particular humor, the mock heroic elements, Jewish humanism, picaresque conventions, monologue, didacticism, authorial intrusion, realism, and numerous character types.

• Gitenstein, Barbara. "Saul Bellow of the 1970's and the Contemporary Use of History in Jewish–American Literature." Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 7–17.
  

  Argues that in the 1970's a number of Jewish writers made the choice of history for the outline of art, and the choice of historical events to validate personal values. Of these, Saul Bellow is the most successful in transforming the facts of history into the art of fiction. In a close study of his novels, the reader can see strong parallels between his "Enlightenment" views of history in art and nineteenth-century American ideals. Illustrates Bellow's thesis that art borrows from fact only what it needs. Gives a detailed account of the use of "facts" in HG. Concludes this thorough exegesis by suggesting that a major theme of the novel is that the individual poet must be in time, but should not be overwhelmed by fact and history. If he is, he will lose his ironic distance from the detail; he will be unable to feel dream-states. Jewish-American writers of the 1970's seem unable to overlook the impact of history on life and art; they try to explain the meaning of being in America in the second half of the twentieth-century through a factual base in history.

• Glaysher, Frederick. "A Poet Looks at Saul Bellow's Soul." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 43–55.
  

  Suggests that Bellow is one of the few American writers to remember that man is a soul, not a mere conglomeration of social conditionings. Describes Bellow as a modern soul set free from a traditional Judeo-Christian or Eastern religious past, but which is hungry, seeking, longing for its rightful home. Describes how against a background of collapsing Western and Eastern religions of the world Bellow lines up firmly on the side of spiritual, Platonic and Augustinian belief in the soul, and a sense of God. Concludes that Bellow's fiction, though it stands free of all traditional religious accoutrements, and ever more free of the cliches of modernism, nevertheless attests to an open channel to the soul, to the deepest part of ourselves.

• Glenday, Michael K. "Some Versions of the Real: The Novellas of Saul Bellow." The Modern American Novella. Ed. Robert A. Lee. New York: St. Martin's London: Visions, 1989. 162–77. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 189–204.
  

  Argues that the very intensity and concentration of the novella form prevents Bellow's metaphysical garrulity and accentuates the common theme that runs through them all—the call to retrieve reality. With its sharp cutting edge it has served Bellow as a sharp tool enabling him to discover enduring cognitions of reality in its more localized forms, especially the urban killing fields of Chicago. Flails SD as a searing condemnation of American reality. Details Tommy's awful day, culminating in Tommy's communion with humankind among the mourners. Describes how Tommy reaches beyond the reality of appearances, beyond Tamkins and Perls and Adlers. Suggests that this novella contains some of Bellow's best writing. "What Kind of Day did you have" consolidates this vision of American reality. Concludes that, like Tommy Wilhelm, these innocents are the misfits without reality in a world of distorted forms. Both novellas are powerful examinations of the extent to which Americans collaborate in this process and which speak of soul.

• Golden, Daniel. "Mystical Musings and Comic Confrontations: The Fiction of Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler." Essays on Canadian Writing 22 (1981): 62–85.
  

  Given the closeness of their immigrant and orthodox roots, the two writers offer instructive contrasts in some of the aspirations and contrasts inherent in American and Canadian Jewish experience. Goes on to compare and contrast both writers in terms of their ethnic backgrounds, search for identity, allegiances, treatment of assimilation themes and comic gifts. Suggests that both writers document the larger plight of mankind and their respective cultures. Both share the ghetto landscape of memory. Both are fascinated with petty crooks, hustlers, and luftmenschen. Both write of legitimate and not-so-legitimate business. Bellow is more mystical and Richler more humorous in response to experience. Contains an excellent discussion of Bellow's utilization of the occult to mediate the failure of intellect and rationality.

• Goldman, Arnold. "A Remnant to Escape: The American Writer and the Minority Group." American Literature Since 1900. Ed. Marcus Cunliffe. History of Literature in the English Language 9. London: Barrie, 1975. 312–43.
  
  
• Goldman, Liela H. "The Holocaust in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Modern Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 71–80.
  

  Describes Bellow's statement on the subject of the Holocaust in terms of his analysis of the misguided Romantic origins of German culture, which in turn gave rise to the phenomenon of Nazism. Goldman sees Nazism as an attack on Western Humanism and characterizes Bellow's novelistic processes of thought as consistently Jewish in their defense of humanistic philosophy. Discusses miso-Germanism in terms of specific Bellow characters throughout the novels and in terms of Bellow's critique of German philosophers responsible for the philosophical bases of German Romanticism.

• Goldman, L. H. "The Jewish Perspective of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lange, 1992. 3–19.
  

  Asserts that Bellow's writings epitomize the moral vision that is an integral part of the Jewish outlook and that it functions on two levels: (1) the conscious, the material that he chooses as an integral part of the his fiction–characters, themes, relationships, etc.; and (2) the unconscious, the Judaism that was ingrained into his psyche as a child and has remained as a perspective throughout his more mature years. In this latter category falls the general philosophy that permeates his work and his attitudes towards people, life, and the universe. Concludes that the quality of Bellow's Jewishness is incontrovertible and that throughout his oeuvre, which comprises his "song of songs," his humanistic voice intones the anthropocentric concerns of his heritage.

• Goldman, Liela H. "Saul Bellow and the Philosophy of Judaism." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 81-95.
  

  Briefly defines Judaism as an ethical, bible-centered monotheism which is fundamentally anthropocentric and which provides reasons for man's existence based on assumptions of human confidence and sufficiency. Within this context Goldman develops the thesis that Bellow is first and foremost Jewish in his philosophy, based as it is on a definable ethical monotheism. Clearly, Bellow believes in a hierarchic universe in which man is created in the image of God with his place a little lower than the angels.

• Goldman, Liela H. "'Shuffling Out of My Vulgar Origins': The Masculinist-Elitist Language of Saul Bellow's Fiction." Melus 16.1 (1989-90): 33-42.
  

  Points out Bellow's sensitivity to language, mastery of several languages, and conscious break with WASP language. Examines his use of Yiddish language conventions, which she insists are equivocal in that Bellow wants to become part of the burgeoning field of American-Jewish literature, (plus its intellectuals) as well as part of an elitist group that transcends this category. Comments on Jewish reliance on verbal power and eloquence as reflected in the characters, and their simultaneous inaction. Points out classist differences between the uses of Yiddish employed by primary and secondary characters through use of the colloquial and the vernacular Yiddish. Shows how Bellow deliberately ascribes certain linguistic skills to his male characters while denying them to his female characters, thus perpetuating the East European sex/class bias. Accuses Bellow of using masculine elitist Yiddish and Yinglish of a vulgar nature while preserving Anglo-Saxon fastidiousness. Concludes that Yiddish was Bellow's Mamaloshen and that he heard it and spoke it before all other languages.

• Goldman, Liela. "Thirty Years of Bellowmania: Saul Bellow's Equivocality as a Jewish-American Writer." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and P. Shiv Kumar. 1983.
  

  Argues that the ambiguity of response to Bellow's novels is matched by his own ambiguity as an American-Jewish writer who won't be labeled as a Jewish writer. Bellow's literature is humanitarian in outlook, positive in perspective, and concerned with freedom of choice, social responsibility, and human dignity. Yet although this world view is Jewish, it lacks the awareness of major historical events, and is a representation directed to a non-Jewish audience. The strain is caused by the strain of his indecisive Jewishness as he sits atop the citadel of WASP achievement. Furthermore, his heroes are Jewish by default and none seem to discuss current historical moments of import to Jews. His avoidance of such a protagonist seems deliberate. The Gentile community notes that his protagonists are Jewish while his Jewish readers woud prefer more specifically Jewish content.

• Goldsmith, Arnold L. "A 'Curse on Columbus': Twentieth Century Jewish-American Fiction and the Theme of Disillusionment." Studies in American Jewish Literature [UniversityPark, PA]5.2 (1979): 47-55. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  
  
• Gollin, Rita K. "Understanding Fathers in American Jewish Fiction." Centennial Review 18.3 (1974): 273-87.
  

  Argues that even a weak Jewish father is capable of passing on the understanding of compassion and comprehension of human limits even when he has failed to master his traditional role as Jewish father. Hence, the Jewish father "remains at the moral center of Jewish fiction." Discusses Asa Leventhal in TV. Asa must, like many Jewish males, "learn to be a father unlike his own." Discusses also H and MSP in terms of these types of fathers.

• Gonzalez Gonzalez, Francisco Javier. "Saul Bellow: Entre el Modernism y el Postmodernismo." Seccion Departamental de Logrono. Actas de las I Jornadas de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana. Logrono: Pubs del Colegio U de Logrono, 1990. 35-40.
  
  
• Goodman, Oscar. "Among Gentiles." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and P. Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 108-24.
  

  Offers an introductory demonstration of how an open cultural approach to Bellow's Jewish heritage elucidates major signs in his novels that might otherwise remain obscure. Focuses on the influence of Bellow's Jewish milieu, religious and secular, along with the general sense of historic Judaism, the east European shtetl traditions, the confrontation of immigrant urban communities and the dominant American culture. Argues that Bellow's novels are about Diaspora, primarily about his perceptions as a son of immigrant jews, his interest in Hasidism, and his responses to alienation. Concludes that the axial lines of his work are Jewish.

• Gordon, Andrew. "Acting and Authenticity in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 137-58.
  

  Takes the metaphor "bad acting" and bad actors used so frequently in Bellow's texts as having two related senses in Bellow's work: first, a poor or unconvincing theatrical performance; and second, bad conduct–lying and deceit; sexual misbehavior, crime, filth, sin and evil. Although his heroes often deplore the theater and acting as false, sinful, or criminal, they are repeatedly drawn to it and get taken in by figurative "bad actors." The heroes are sometimes amused by bad actors, sometimes feel superior to them, but often grow furious at them. Traces Bellow's own attractions and ambivalences to actors, acting, and the theater, as well as those of each of the novels. Concludes that Bellow, like Charlie Citrine, has abandoned the theater but that he did write one of those one-act plays and had a play on Broadway, The Last Analysis. Describes the hero of that play, Bummidge, as a broken-down vaudevillian with intellectual pretensions who stages, for his therapy and our entertainment, a philosophical farce, a vaudeville of the mind. Concludes that this too in the "last analysis" is what Saul Bellow as novelist has staged for us as readers.

• Gordon, Andrew. "The Ancient Mariner, and Other Encounters with Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 57-66.
  
  
• Gordon, Andrew. "The Hero as Sucker in Saul Bellow's Early Fiction." Saul Bellow Journal 6.2 (1987): 47-63.
  

  Explains Bellow's use of the terms suckerfish, sucker, and succor and how they are related not only by sound, but also by their unconscious sense. Argues that they are all connected to the Bellow hero's emotional dilemma, which revolves around problems of oral passivity and dependency. Provides limited discussion on the protagonists in DM, SD, and two short stories, "A Father to Be" and "Leaving the Yellow House."

• Grace, Nancy M. "Beyond the Mask of Silence: Saul Bellow and the Feminized Male." The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth Century Literature. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1995. 193-230.
  

  Discusses Bellow's break with the Hemingway "code" in his production of heroes who yearn to express themselves, and who ruminate constantly about their fears and pains. Suggests that ost readers stop short of calling them "feminine" and how Bellow reshapes his feminine heroes constantly by showing them locked in culture-bound conflicts. Traces this through each of the novels from the corrupted psyche of Tommy Wilhelm to the reversal of negative male femininity in Henderson. Aruges that Africa stands for Henderson's feminine while Charlie Citring is portrayed as a distinctly feminine character who, far from lacking a quest, simply wants consciousness and the right to be rather than become. Provides a lengthy disquisition on Charles' feminine virtues, and by comparing him with all of the other male characters he encounters. Ultimately argues that Charlie wishes to strip off much of his male mask and recover the sentimental feelings of his Jewish childhood. Discusses his engagement in masculine thought and competitive male relationships in which other men seem to know what they want. Traces Charlie's progressive exit from masculine forums and entry into meditative states. The Charlie who leaves the cemetery at the end of the novel notes the spring flowers blooming in the midst of death is a man who has begun to acknowledge his feelings. A major article.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Bellow's Canadian Beginnings." Saul Bellow Journal 7.1 (1988): 27-34.
  

  Discusses Bellow's Montreal multilingual childhood with its physical environs and the impact of these influences on the novels. Traces references to both, throughout DM and H in particular.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Bellow's Hand Writing: The Tactile Imagination." English Studies in Canada 21.4 (1995): 457-69. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 77-90.
  

  Claims that what makes Saul Bellow's fiction so all-encompassing is his blending of physical details of Chicago's underworld with the metaphysics of European philosophy. To mediate between the extremes of abstraction and the concrete Bellow relies on the sense of touch to examine the many channels and avenues of his characters' universe. His emphasis on the tactile is the hallmark of his fiction as characters grope for higher meaning while exploring the sensory pleasures of the quotation; on the one hand, the higher reaches of thought; on the other, the reality of the American streets paved with fools' gold. Concludes that of the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx outfit, Saul Bellow nimbly stitches the very fabric and texture of fiction, where the first to knock on second thought has the last laugh.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Bellow and Anthropology." Saul Bellow Journal 14:2 (1996): 17-27.
  

  Points out that Bellow's most telling observation on the subject of anthropology appears in "Cousins," where he speculates directly on the subject of Jews and anthropology. Suggests that Bellow might have been influenced by Victor Turner, a member of the famous Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Turner, after all, spent a lifetime researching the ritual processes of various tribal initiation rites and rites of passage in particular. Traces the tripartite pattern established by Turner: 1) preliminary, 2) liminal, 3) postliminary, with the liminary stage as the most important. Applies this paradigm to AAM and HRK. Concludes that Bellow, in his liminality, features a direct ascent into transcendence, and settles for the weave of the text where tactile and textile intersect. This is a place where he combines high and low metaphysics and comedy, the sublime and the subliminal, margin and center, anthropology and archeology, communitas and liminality. Concludes that while anthropology provides a model for the metonymic juxtaposition of humanity, Bellow's imagination provides the metaphoric thrust to go beyond the physicality of metonymy toward metaleptic and metaphysical spheres.

• Greenstein, Michael. "Breaking the Mosaid Code: Jewish Literature vs. the Law." Mosaic 27.3 (1994): 87-106.
  

  A major treatment of several writers whose key works demonstrate the idea of literature versus the law, or law versus midrashic commentary by rabbis and writers, a literature which engages in intergeneric, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary exceptions to the law and its autochthons. Deals at length with Freud's supplanting of Moses as lawgiver in Moses and Monotheism, then treats similar maneuvers in Kafka's The Trial, Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, in the works of S. Y. Agnon, in A. M. Klein's The Second Scroll, and lastly, in Bellow's H. Sees Herzog as the lawgiver who refuses to be given laws in this American system. Describes how Bellow develops the law-and-literature symbiosis between Herzog and Simkin–a man he pities as he simultaneously pokes fun at the Herzogs and Simkins of the world who are alternately full of tendentious tendencies and highbrow avoidance of realism. Notes also how through corrective irony Bellow mediates a position wherein if the law turns cruel, literary realism must restore the balance in favor of humanity. Details Herzog's relationships with his other lawyers–Sandor Himmelstein in particular–who offers him only cruel advice and cowardly potato love. Describes Herzog's firsthand experience of the playing out of authority and degeneracy, which in the person of the terrible Dickensian magistrate are one and the same. Concludes that through Herzog we see that law and literature have a similar currency in Bellow's grasp of truth, honor, and realism. Bellow's dualism incorporates the underbelly of criminality with abstract ideas of law and justice–"Nastiness in the transcendent position."

• Gross, Theodore L. "Saul Bellow: The Victim and the Hero." The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. Theodore L. Gross. New York: Free Press, 1971. 243-61.
  

  In the context of a chapter entitled: "The Quixotic Hero," Gross suggests that unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Bellow has involuntarily favored the more conforming or melioristic side of the question of idealism or nihilism. In Bellow's work the hero has become an Americanized fusion of Dostoevsky's Underground Man and Kafka's Joseph K., not so much a victim of external authority as of his own weaknesses, someone who has forced himself out of that society. Their condition is suffering toward love.

• Grossman, Edward. "The Bitterness of Saul Bellow." Midstream 16.7 (1970): 3-15.
  

  Comments that all of Bellow's protagonists suffer from more than their fair share of temperament. Mr. Sammler suffers from the same ailment, and, like others, refuses to throw over his illusions about goodness. Provides a general appraisal of the novel focusing on a variety of elements. Condemns Bellow for his skepticism and concludes, "If the most respected and intelligent novelist of the Establishment has only this to say about us, why bother with other more profound and disturbing things he has to say about America."

• Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. "Saul Bellow: Inward and Upward, Past Distraction." Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel—Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 120-45.
  

  Argues that Bellow didn't start out by writing progress novels because he did not like aging past boyhood. Sees his history as a writer of progress novels as a curious, interrupted one, which finally focuses on the middle years. Divides his treatment of the midlife novel into the following categories: (1) Crises of Aging, (2) Victim Literature, (3) The Three Volume Cure, (4) Phenomenal Woman, (5) Phenomenal Man, (6) The Comic Surprise, and (7) Late Starters, Slower Learners, Eager Happy Beginners. Concludes that like our other bildungsromanciers, Bellow has found a way to rescue the state of happy anticipation from its literary connections with youth-on-the-threshold-of-life and restore it to the middle years. Calls this midlife progress narrative a deeply reverential form which makes a good wish for its readers: that people of all ages might live so.

• Gunn, Drewey Wayne. American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973. Austin: U of Texas P, 1974. 204-08.
  
  
• Guttmann, Allen. "Mr. Bellow's America." The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. Allen Guttmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. 178-22.
  

  Discusses each of the novels up to MSP under the heading of its own title. Concentrates on the twin ideas of Jewish assimilation and the quest for identity in each case, treating the protagonists as marginal men, as Jews and as typical urban Americans. A major chapter.

• Guttmann, ,&lien. "Saul Bellow's Humane Comedy." Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978. 127-51.
  

  Argues that Bellow's chief subject is the mind's comical struggle with ideas. Begins with some brief references to Bummidge in LA. In this major article on Bellow and the comic artist, Guttmann reviews each of the novels in turn. In the course of this exhaustive analysis he discusses sources, influences, and style of humor. He also discusses ideas, philosophy, characters, and the language of humor itself. Guttmann's overriding thesis is the essential humanity of the comic vision in Bellow. Concludes that the comic triumphs of HRK, H, and MSP have not been equalled in the later fiction.

• Fairman, Lynette A. "Finitude, Anxiety and Affirmation in Saul Bellow's Novels." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 40–46.
  

  Discusses how from the beginning the critics have examined death in the Bellow novel as both symbol and theme. Asserts that "while many critics discuss the role of death in Bellow's novels, they do not fully analyze the anxiety the characters' experience as a result of their mortality."

• Faraci, Mary. "Saul Bellow and Comparative Politics." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 68–83.
  

  Discusses how DD, set in the Ceausescu years, is the first Western account of Eastern Europe to liberate reports of Eastern Europe from the arrogance of ill-informed journalists, and to reflect on the sad state of language in their journalistic reports. Styled against such Western journalists, Dean Corde is capable of experimenting with language available to him, eschewing the use of stereotypes, and exploring new linguistic ways of talking about knowledge and freedom. Thus Corde manages to restore to the images that attracted Western reporters, the missing emotions, and values. Concludes that primarily through the use of linguistic "shifters"like you, Bellow is able to win back their freedom to talk.

• Ferrand, Pierre. "Letters to the Editor." Midstream Nov./Dec. 1996: 45.
  

  Response to article by Samuel H. Dresner.

• Fiedler, Leslie A. "Saul Bellow." Prairie Schooner 31 (1957): 103–10. Rpt. in On Contemporary Literature: An Anthology of Critical Essays on the Major Movements and Writers of Contemporary Literature. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Avon, 1964. 286–95; Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 1–24; The Modern Critical Spectrum. Eds. Gerald Jay Goldberg and Nancy Marmer Goldberg. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1962. 155–61; The Collected Essays of Leslie Fielder. New York: Stein, 1971. 2: 56–64. 2 vols; A Fielder Reader. New York: Stein, 1977. 108–16.
  

  Places Bellow as a young writer in the tradition of other beginning writers. Also describes the dilemma of being the Jewish-American writer and his role in describing the problems of Jewish assimilation. Makes general comments on style and theme in the early novels and concludes that Bcllow's art begins with the collapse of the proletarian novel of the 1930's.

• Field, Leslie. "Saul Bellow: From Montreal to Jerusalem." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 4.2 (1978): 51–59. Joint issue with Yiddish 3.3 (1978).
  

  Field borrows Irving Howe's phrase "tradition as discontinuity" to describe the Jewishness of Bellow's novels. For Field H is the most Jewish of the novels, since it portrays Bellow's vision of "a world of Jews transplanted to North America." The article goes on to deal with TJB and concludes that perhaps Bellow "now joins Jewish-American writers Henry Roth, Herbert Gold, and others as born-again Jews."

• Field, Leslie. "Saul Bellow and the Critics After the Nobel Award." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 3–13.
  

  A literary historical treatment of the aftermath of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Saul Bellow. Ends with a summary of the current scholarship and interest in Bellow.

• Fineman, Irving. "The Image of the Jew in Fiction of the Future." National Jewish Monthly Dee. 1967: 48–51.
  

  A general article dealing with the image of the American Jew in twentieth-century literature. Makes brief mention of Bellow within this context.

• Finkelstein, Sidney. "Lost Social Convictions and Existentialism: Arthur Miller and Saul Bellow." Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. Sidney Finkelstein. New York: International, 1965. 252–69.
  

  Compares Miller and Bellow in terms of their fictional biographies and their brilliant witty dialogue. Discusses both writers in terms of the intellectual milieu of the 1950's and its preoccupation with existentialism. Talks of the "religious existentialism" of H and of the existentialist ideas found throughout the novels prior to H.

• Fisch, Harold. "Bellow and Kafka." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 159–72.
  

  Argues that there is a unity between Kafka and Bellow in linguistic use and function and that Bellow was directly influenced by Kafka. Proceeds to discuss their use of metaphor and metonymy in Jakobsonian terms. Sees Kafka's work as metaphorical and fabulistic, while Bellow's fictions are overpoweringly metonymic and marked by a distinctive descriptive realism to the point we are crushed by the multiplicity of detail that abounds in a limited verbal space. Like Dreiser, Bellow gives us a vision of the urban wilderness in which we live our lives. Kafka's dramatic fables, by contrast, are enacted on an unlocalized universal stage. They are parables of the human condition rather than particularized images of one phase or one aspect of that condition. Concludes that Kafka bequeathed to modern literature the themes of alienation, loss, guilt, and anxiety, and then notes that they seem to have grown out of his own sense of exile as both a personal and collective experience. Concludes that we have come a great distance from Kafka to a modern American writer like Bellow, for whom it may be true to say that all people suffer alienation and exile–the Jew hardly more than anyone else.

• Fisch, Harold. "Saul Bellow and Philip Roth." New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1998. 133–53.
  

  Details Bellow's rich combinations of biblical archetypes, not only selling them at work, but selling up their antitheses. The result is a dialect conducted between two opposing patterns and archetypes. Mostly analyzes MSP and H in terms of such antitheses.

• Fishman, Ethan. "Saul Bellow's 'Likely Stories.'" Journal of Politics 45.3 (1983): 615–34.
  
  
• Fleischmann, Wolf gang Bernard. "The Contemporary 'Jewish Novel' in America." Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien 12 (1967): 159–66.
  
  
• Fossum, Robert. "The Devil and Saul Bellow." Comparative Literature Studies 3.2 (1966): 197–206. Rpt. in Mansions of the Spirit: Essays in Literature and Religion. Ed. George A. Panichas. New York: Hawthorn, 1967. 345–55.
  

  Suggests that, though professing no allegiance to any theological system and filling his novels with largely non-religious Jews, Bellow, along with many contemporary American and European writers, is concerned with questions about the nature and state of the contemporary soul. Fossum goes on to articulate the contraries within the Bellow character which indicate the presence of both good and evil within man, and the ever-present Faustian tempter whose literary origins are Goethean.

• Fossum, Robert. "Inflationary Trends in the Criticism of Fiction: Four Studies of Saul Bellow." Studies in the Novel 2.1 (1970): 99–104.
  

  Grants Bellow major status, yet Fossom doubts that his work "warrants the detailed explication given it" in four books on Bellow by Tony Tanner, Keith Opdahl, James J. Clayton and Irving Malin. Of the four he approves of only Tanner's work.

• Frank, Joan. "Bellow's Blues." Iowa Review 29.1 (1999): 5–10.
  

  Discusses Bellow's "My Paris" as a self-satisfyingly gloomy detailing of the loss of the Paris of his youth which rings with irritating familiarity. It is a requiem for the loss of an ineffable essence, the death of what nostalgia has previously fixed on. Concludes that in the face of the decline of Paris as a great center of civilization, it falls upon us to imagine even more vigorously the great theater of Western Civilization, regardless. Concludes that ince Bellow's lost Paris is lost, we have to take the only one we have, that Paris as we now find it.

• Frank, Reuben. "Saul Bellow: The Evolution of a Contemporary Novelist." Western Review 18.2 (1954): 101–12.
  

  Characterizes Bellow's evolution as a contemporary writer in terms of his move from "tightness and sparsity to a free and rich form; attitudinally, from despair to a kind of reserved affirmation." Sees Bellow as a writer who is able to immerse himself as "the perceptions and consciousness of the first-generation American, suspended between the new American and old European cultures, and to speak out with a voice that is uniquely his."

• Freedman, Ralph. "Saul Bellow: The Illusion of Environment." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 1.1 (1960): 50–65. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 51–68.
  

  Relates Bellow's first two novels to the traditions of the social or naturalistic novel, and explains how, as a reaction against determinism, he experiences the world as private experience rendered as art. With the later novels, Be!low changes the earlier tradition. Society now reflects the hero's consciousness instead of being in opposition to him. The middle period novels take the process one step further by showing the hero and world related in a rather light dialectic. Both the hero and the world prove to be evanescent as well as stable. The novels of this period also create the victim character as an extension and a mockery of his environment. Examines these concepts primarily within the early novels.

• Freedman, William. "Hanging for Pleasure and Profit: Truth as Necessary Illusion in Bellow's Fiction." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 35.1 (1999): 3–27.
  

  Argues that Bellow's fiction celebrates the value of life, and the hope that truth will triumph at the last; however there might be more dignity than success in the search for this truth. But is the triumph of truth crucial to life's value? Likens the search for truth in Bellow's fiction to the story of the beggar who sat in a high tower outside the town to watch for the coming of the Messiah. Surveys Bellow criticism for its comments on issues of transcendent truth-seeking and then examines a selection of novels. Concludes that in the Bellow novel, ultimately, efforts to transcend subjective enclosure in objective understanding have turned him back with a new assertive force into the self, where all ladders start and inevitably end. Reality, finally, only comes for Augie in the account of the self. In Bellow the ultimate frustration of the intellect turns us toward created accounts of created selves that are elaborated fictions.

• Freiert, William K. "Classical Myth in Contemporary American Fiction." Classical and Modern Literature 10.2 (1989): 47–61.
  

  Claims that many American writers of the last thirty years have used classical mythology as a source of themes, images, and structure. Points out Bellow's debt to Joyce's Ulysses in HG and goes on to discuss how Bellow's work is informed by classical mythology and the romantic ideal, along with Jungian constructs, and Oedipal theory.

• Friedman, Alan Warren. "The Jew's Complaint in Recent American Fiction: Beyond Exodus and Still in the Wilderness." Southern Review 8.1 (1972): 41–59.
  

  Friedman articulates at length the situation of the Jewish writer in mid-century American culture and ranges across the works of a number of American-Jewish writers in the process. His remarks on Bellow's HRK are of particular interest.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Bellow and Freud." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 59–80.
  

  A landmark article which traces in immense detail the influences of Freud's thinking and world view upon Be!low's work. Provides an in-depth introduction to Freudian thought and develops the thesis that Bellow identifies Freud as the preeminent modern thinker. Demonstrates how Bellow's ultimate reflection of modernism is couched primarily in terms of his rejection of Freudian estimates and premises. A major article.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Literature and Politics: The Bellow/Grass Confrontation at the PEN Congress." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 49–57.
  

  Describes the Bellow/Grass confrontation at the PEN Congress of 1986. Outlines the theme of the conference as "The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State." Describes Bellow on the alienation panel giving a pointed but casual talk discussing exile, alienation, the spiritual mansion of language in which we all live, the cultural history of alienation, American democracy, and the lack of culture, gods, and demons in American experience. Argues that his culminating point, shown so often in his fiction, is the substitution of the gratification of innumerable desires for all of these missing items. Hence, while we live in a country full of psychobabble, security, health, and justice, we also live in hells of spiritual alienation. Describes Gunter Grass as not widely read enough. His view of Bellow's remarks was unjust, implying that Bellow had not taken into consideration the realities of political economy as class struggle and imperialism. Reports in great detail Bellow's sardonic response to Grass's rather crude remarks about the moribund nature of the capitalist state. Concludes that the heart of the Bellow/Grass confrontation is the vexed question of the relationship between truth and power, vision and action. Though the two writers can't be simplistically characterized by two opposite poles, nevertheless artists need to respond to politics in order to defend themselves from it. Explicates both Bellow and Grass on these perspectives.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Saul Bellow and the Modern Tradition." Contemporary Literature 15.1 (1974): 67–89. Expanded version rpt. in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Daniel Fuchs. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1984. 3–27.
  

  Calls Bellow a post-modernist par excellence. Shows how he throws over the Flaubertian and modernist pereoccupation with style. Traces this through the works of Flaubert and Joyce. Illustrates Bellow's break with nihilist premises which also characterize much modern fiction, along with his questioning of modernist assumptions such as alienation, fragmentation, break with tradition, isolation, magnification of subjectivity and hatred of civilization. Treats each of the novels in terms of this thesis. A major article.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Saul Bellow and the Example of Dostoevsky." The Stoic Strain in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Marston La France. Ed. Duane J. MacMillan. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. 157–76. Revised version rpt. in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1984. 28–49; Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 211–33. Originally delivered as a lecture at the second annual meeting of the Austrian American Studies Association, Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Oct. 1955.
  

  Denies that we can go on saying with Hemingway that all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. Much contemporary American literature comes from F!aubert and the Russians. Bellow is the leading exponent of the Russian way. Of particular note is the influence of Dostoevsky on Bellow. An erudite and major analysis.

• Furman, Andrew. "The Importance of Saul Bellow." English Academy Review [South Africa] 14 (1997): 59–72.
  

  Argues against the theory-ridden climate of English departments today, and their disdain of close reading, or neglect of the primary literary text. Argues that amidst postmodern hoopla, we need to recoup the revelatory experiences and quality of good fiction. Explicates Bellow's 1990 lecture "The Distracted Public" centering on the question of whether the reading public's "mounting demand for thrill," can ever be "brought under conthe trol." Discusses at length Bellow's investment in ideas of soul, the humanistic enterprise, and moral and religious issues. Traces the redemptive thread that runs through Bellow's essentially Modernist literary vision. Covers nearly all of the major works. Concludes that Bellow, and our best literature, drown out the deafending hum of our information age to express the heart's truths and essences.

• Furman, Andrew. "Saul Bellow's Middle East Problem." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 40–67. Rpt. in Isreal Through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish American Literature on Israel 1928–1995. SUNY Series on Modern Jewish Literature and Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 59–81.
  

  Considers it something of a puzzle that Bellow directs his moralizing energies toward the enigmatic Middle East given Bellow's longstanding quarrel with being constantly labeled a Jewish writer, and also his early rejection of Meyer Levin and his Zionism. Points out, however, that the young Bellow who followed Trotsky and declared himself a Marxist is not the same writer who wrote TJB. Examines the contrary mood of the Jewish American community during the period of the 1967 war, and presents Bellow's canny and slightly aloof stance in MSP and TJB. Suggests that the disparity between Sammler's perspective and Bellow's serves to illustrate the very real cost of Israeli might, particularly in the depiction of the violent Eisen. Also discusses Bellow's seeming confusion about the Middle East and his inability to penetrate beneath the surface of the Israeli condition. Considers that the book's strength lies in Bellow's bored voice and skepticism, and its weakness in the way Bellow's bookishness and erudition obscure his emotional investment in Israel. Concludes that it would be unfair, given the qualified affirmations of the novels to ask Bellow to start fudging with regard to the Middle East.

• Fairman, Lynette A. "Finitude, Anxiety and Affirmation in Saul Bellow's Novels." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 40–46.
  

  Discusses how from the beginning the critics have examined death in the Bellow novel as both symbol and theme. Asserts that "while many critics discuss the role of death in Bellow's novels, they do not fully analyze the anxiety the characters' experience as a result of their mortality."

• Faraci, Mary. "Saul Bellow and Comparative Politics." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 68–83.
  

  Discusses how DD, set in the Ceausescu years, is the first Western account of Eastern Europe to liberate reports of Eastern Europe from the arrogance of ill-informed journalists, and to reflect on the sad state of language in their journalistic reports. Styled against such Western journalists, Dean Corde is capable of experimenting with language available to him, eschewing the use of stereotypes, and exploring new linguistic ways of talking about knowledge and freedom. Thus Corde manages to restore to the images that attracted Western reporters, the missing emotions, and values. Concludes that primarily through the use of linguistic "shifters"like you, Bellow is able to win back their freedom to talk.

• Ferrand, Pierre. "Letters to the Editor." Midstream Nov./Dec. 1996: 45.
  

  Response to article by Samuel H. Dresner.

• Fiedler, Leslie A. "Saul Bellow." Prairie Schooner 31 (1957): 103–10. Rpt. in On Contemporary Literature: An Anthology of Critical Essays on the Major Movements and Writers of Contemporary Literature. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Avon, 1964. 286–95; Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 1–24; The Modern Critical Spectrum. Eds. Gerald Jay Goldberg and Nancy Marmer Goldberg. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1962. 155–61; The Collected Essays of Leslie Fielder. New York: Stein, 1971. 2: 56–64. 2 vols; A Fielder Reader. New York: Stein, 1977. 108–16.
  

  Places Bellow as a young writer in the tradition of other beginning writers. Also describes the dilemma of being the Jewish-American writer and his role in describing the problems of Jewish assimilation. Makes general comments on style and theme in the early novels and concludes that Bcllow's art begins with the collapse of the proletarian novel of the 1930's.

• Field, Leslie. "Saul Bellow: From Montreal to Jerusalem." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 4.2 (1978): 51–59. Joint issue with Yiddish 3.3 (1978).
  

  Field borrows Irving Howe's phrase "tradition as discontinuity" to describe the Jewishness of Bellow's novels. For Field H is the most Jewish of the novels, since it portrays Bellow's vision of "a world of Jews transplanted to North America." The article goes on to deal with TJB and concludes that perhaps Bellow "now joins Jewish-American writers Henry Roth, Herbert Gold, and others as born-again Jews."

• Field, Leslie. "Saul Bellow and the Critics After the Nobel Award." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 3–13.
  

  A literary historical treatment of the aftermath of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Saul Bellow. Ends with a summary of the current scholarship and interest in Bellow.

• Fineman, Irving. "The Image of the Jew in Fiction of the Future." National Jewish Monthly Dee. 1967: 48–51.
  

  A general article dealing with the image of the American Jew in twentieth-century literature. Makes brief mention of Bellow within this context.

• Finkelstein, Sidney. "Lost Social Convictions and Existentialism: Arthur Miller and Saul Bellow." Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. Sidney Finkelstein. New York: International, 1965. 252–69.
  

  Compares Miller and Bellow in terms of their fictional biographies and their brilliant witty dialogue. Discusses both writers in terms of the intellectual milieu of the 1950's and its preoccupation with existentialism. Talks of the "religious existentialism" of H and of the existentialist ideas found throughout the novels prior to H.

• Fisch, Harold. "Bellow and Kafka." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 159–72.
  

  Argues that there is a unity between Kafka and Bellow in linguistic use and function and that Bellow was directly influenced by Kafka. Proceeds to discuss their use of metaphor and metonymy in Jakobsonian terms. Sees Kafka's work as metaphorical and fabulistic, while Bellow's fictions are overpoweringly metonymic and marked by a distinctive descriptive realism to the point we are crushed by the multiplicity of detail that abounds in a limited verbal space. Like Dreiser, Bellow gives us a vision of the urban wilderness in which we live our lives. Kafka's dramatic fables, by contrast, are enacted on an unlocalized universal stage. They are parables of the human condition rather than particularized images of one phase or one aspect of that condition. Concludes that Kafka bequeathed to modern literature the themes of alienation, loss, guilt, and anxiety, and then notes that they seem to have grown out of his own sense of exile as both a personal and collective experience. Concludes that we have come a great distance from Kafka to a modern American writer like Bellow, for whom it may be true to say that all people suffer alienation and exile–the Jew hardly more than anyone else.

• Fisch, Harold. "Saul Bellow and Philip Roth." New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1998. 133–53.
  

  Details Bellow's rich combinations of biblical archetypes, not only selling them at work, but selling up their antitheses. The result is a dialect conducted between two opposing patterns and archetypes. Mostly analyzes MSP and H in terms of such antitheses.

• Fishman, Ethan. "Saul Bellow's 'Likely Stories.'" Journal of Politics 45.3 (1983): 615–34.
  
  
• Fleischmann, Wolf gang Bernard. "The Contemporary 'Jewish Novel' in America." Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien 12 (1967): 159–66.
  
  
• Fossum, Robert. "The Devil and Saul Bellow." Comparative Literature Studies 3.2 (1966): 197–206. Rpt. in Mansions of the Spirit: Essays in Literature and Religion. Ed. George A. Panichas. New York: Hawthorn, 1967. 345–55.
  

  Suggests that, though professing no allegiance to any theological system and filling his novels with largely non-religious Jews, Bellow, along with many contemporary American and European writers, is concerned with questions about the nature and state of the contemporary soul. Fossum goes on to articulate the contraries within the Bellow character which indicate the presence of both good and evil within man, and the ever-present Faustian tempter whose literary origins are Goethean.

• Fossum, Robert. "Inflationary Trends in the Criticism of Fiction: Four Studies of Saul Bellow." Studies in the Novel 2.1 (1970): 99–104.
  

  Grants Bellow major status, yet Fossom doubts that his work "warrants the detailed explication given it" in four books on Bellow by Tony Tanner, Keith Opdahl, James J. Clayton and Irving Malin. Of the four he approves of only Tanner's work.

• Frank, Joan. "Bellow's Blues." Iowa Review 29.1 (1999): 5–10.
  

  Discusses Bellow's "My Paris" as a self-satisfyingly gloomy detailing of the loss of the Paris of his youth which rings with irritating familiarity. It is a requiem for the loss of an ineffable essence, the death of what nostalgia has previously fixed on. Concludes that in the face of the decline of Paris as a great center of civilization, it falls upon us to imagine even more vigorously the great theater of Western Civilization, regardless. Concludes that ince Bellow's lost Paris is lost, we have to take the only one we have, that Paris as we now find it.

• Frank, Reuben. "Saul Bellow: The Evolution of a Contemporary Novelist." Western Review 18.2 (1954): 101–12.
  

  Characterizes Bellow's evolution as a contemporary writer in terms of his move from "tightness and sparsity to a free and rich form; attitudinally, from despair to a kind of reserved affirmation." Sees Bellow as a writer who is able to immerse himself as "the perceptions and consciousness of the first-generation American, suspended between the new American and old European cultures, and to speak out with a voice that is uniquely his."

• Freedman, Ralph. "Saul Bellow: The Illusion of Environment." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 1.1 (1960): 50–65. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 51–68.
  

  Relates Bellow's first two novels to the traditions of the social or naturalistic novel, and explains how, as a reaction against determinism, he experiences the world as private experience rendered as art. With the later novels, Be!low changes the earlier tradition. Society now reflects the hero's consciousness instead of being in opposition to him. The middle period novels take the process one step further by showing the hero and world related in a rather light dialectic. Both the hero and the world prove to be evanescent as well as stable. The novels of this period also create the victim character as an extension and a mockery of his environment. Examines these concepts primarily within the early novels.

• Freedman, William. "Hanging for Pleasure and Profit: Truth as Necessary Illusion in Bellow's Fiction." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 35.1 (1999): 3–27.
  

  Argues that Bellow's fiction celebrates the value of life, and the hope that truth will triumph at the last; however there might be more dignity than success in the search for this truth. But is the triumph of truth crucial to life's value? Likens the search for truth in Bellow's fiction to the story of the beggar who sat in a high tower outside the town to watch for the coming of the Messiah. Surveys Bellow criticism for its comments on issues of transcendent truth-seeking and then examines a selection of novels. Concludes that in the Bellow novel, ultimately, efforts to transcend subjective enclosure in objective understanding have turned him back with a new assertive force into the self, where all ladders start and inevitably end. Reality, finally, only comes for Augie in the account of the self. In Bellow the ultimate frustration of the intellect turns us toward created accounts of created selves that are elaborated fictions.

• Freiert, William K. "Classical Myth in Contemporary American Fiction." Classical and Modern Literature 10.2 (1989): 47–61.
  

  Claims that many American writers of the last thirty years have used classical mythology as a source of themes, images, and structure. Points out Bellow's debt to Joyce's Ulysses in HG and goes on to discuss how Bellow's work is informed by classical mythology and the romantic ideal, along with Jungian constructs, and Oedipal theory.

• Friedman, Alan Warren. "The Jew's Complaint in Recent American Fiction: Beyond Exodus and Still in the Wilderness." Southern Review 8.1 (1972): 41–59.
  

  Friedman articulates at length the situation of the Jewish writer in mid-century American culture and ranges across the works of a number of American-Jewish writers in the process. His remarks on Bellow's HRK are of particular interest.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Bellow and Freud." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 59–80.
  

  A landmark article which traces in immense detail the influences of Freud's thinking and world view upon Be!low's work. Provides an in-depth introduction to Freudian thought and develops the thesis that Bellow identifies Freud as the preeminent modern thinker. Demonstrates how Bellow's ultimate reflection of modernism is couched primarily in terms of his rejection of Freudian estimates and premises. A major article.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Literature and Politics: The Bellow/Grass Confrontation at the PEN Congress." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 49–57.
  

  Describes the Bellow/Grass confrontation at the PEN Congress of 1986. Outlines the theme of the conference as "The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State." Describes Bellow on the alienation panel giving a pointed but casual talk discussing exile, alienation, the spiritual mansion of language in which we all live, the cultural history of alienation, American democracy, and the lack of culture, gods, and demons in American experience. Argues that his culminating point, shown so often in his fiction, is the substitution of the gratification of innumerable desires for all of these missing items. Hence, while we live in a country full of psychobabble, security, health, and justice, we also live in hells of spiritual alienation. Describes Gunter Grass as not widely read enough. His view of Bellow's remarks was unjust, implying that Bellow had not taken into consideration the realities of political economy as class struggle and imperialism. Reports in great detail Bellow's sardonic response to Grass's rather crude remarks about the moribund nature of the capitalist state. Concludes that the heart of the Bellow/Grass confrontation is the vexed question of the relationship between truth and power, vision and action. Though the two writers can't be simplistically characterized by two opposite poles, nevertheless artists need to respond to politics in order to defend themselves from it. Explicates both Bellow and Grass on these perspectives.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Saul Bellow and the Modern Tradition." Contemporary Literature 15.1 (1974): 67–89. Expanded version rpt. in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Daniel Fuchs. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1984. 3–27.
  

  Calls Bellow a post-modernist par excellence. Shows how he throws over the Flaubertian and modernist pereoccupation with style. Traces this through the works of Flaubert and Joyce. Illustrates Bellow's break with nihilist premises which also characterize much modern fiction, along with his questioning of modernist assumptions such as alienation, fragmentation, break with tradition, isolation, magnification of subjectivity and hatred of civilization. Treats each of the novels in terms of this thesis. A major article.

• Fuchs, Daniel. "Saul Bellow and the Example of Dostoevsky." The Stoic Strain in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Marston La France. Ed. Duane J. MacMillan. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. 157–76. Revised version rpt. in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1984. 28–49; Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 211–33. Originally delivered as a lecture at the second annual meeting of the Austrian American Studies Association, Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Oct. 1955.
  

  Denies that we can go on saying with Hemingway that all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. Much contemporary American literature comes from F!aubert and the Russians. Bellow is the leading exponent of the Russian way. Of particular note is the influence of Dostoevsky on Bellow. An erudite and major analysis.

• Furman, Andrew. "The Importance of Saul Bellow." English Academy Review [South Africa] 14 (1997): 59–72.
  

  Argues against the theory-ridden climate of English departments today, and their disdain of close reading, or neglect of the primary literary text. Argues that amidst postmodern hoopla, we need to recoup the revelatory experiences and quality of good fiction. Explicates Bellow's 1990 lecture "The Distracted Public" centering on the question of whether the reading public's "mounting demand for thrill," can ever be "brought under conthe trol." Discusses at length Bellow's investment in ideas of soul, the humanistic enterprise, and moral and religious issues. Traces the redemptive thread that runs through Bellow's essentially Modernist literary vision. Covers nearly all of the major works. Concludes that Bellow, and our best literature, drown out the deafending hum of our information age to express the heart's truths and essences.

• Furman, Andrew. "Saul Bellow's Middle East Problem." Saul Bellow Journal 14:1 (1996): 40–67. Rpt. in Isreal Through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish American Literature on Israel 1928–1995. SUNY Series on Modern Jewish Literature and Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 59–81.
  

  Considers it something of a puzzle that Bellow directs his moralizing energies toward the enigmatic Middle East given Bellow's longstanding quarrel with being constantly labeled a Jewish writer, and also his early rejection of Meyer Levin and his Zionism. Points out, however, that the young Bellow who followed Trotsky and declared himself a Marxist is not the same writer who wrote TJB. Examines the contrary mood of the Jewish American community during the period of the 1967 war, and presents Bellow's canny and slightly aloof stance in MSP and TJB. Suggests that the disparity between Sammler's perspective and Bellow's serves to illustrate the very real cost of Israeli might, particularly in the depiction of the violent Eisen. Also discusses Bellow's seeming confusion about the Middle East and his inability to penetrate beneath the surface of the Israeli condition. Considers that the book's strength lies in Bellow's bored voice and skepticism, and its weakness in the way Bellow's bookishness and erudition obscure his emotional investment in Israel. Concludes that it would be unfair, given the qualified affirmations of the novels to ask Bellow to start fudging with regard to the Middle East.

• Ichikawa, Masumi. "A Bhuddistic Interpretation of Saul Be!low's Three Novels—Dangling Man, The Victim and Seize the Day." Chu-Shikoku Studies in American Literature 19 (June 1983): 36-47. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1983.
  
  
• Ickstadt, Heinz. Der Amerikanische Roman in 20 Jahrhundert: Transformation des Mimetischen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. [German.]
  
  
• Ichikawa, Masumi. "A Bhuddistic Interpretation of Saul Be!low's Three Novels—Dangling Man, The Victim and Seize the Day." Chu-Shikoku Studies in American Literature 19 (June 1983): 36-47. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1983.
  
  
• Ickstadt, Heinz. Der Amerikanische Roman in 20 Jahrhundert: Transformation des Mimetischen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. [German.]
  
  

• Hall, James. "Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Creating, Self-Vindicating, High Energy Man: Saul Bellow." The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room: The British and American Novel Since 1930. James Hall. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1968. 127-80.
  

  Discusses the characters as "walking syntheses of modernism." Hall claims they differ from other modern heroes in that they consider themselves problem-solvers and refuse to remain passive. Claims that they are high-energy men who contain within themselves layers and layers of ideal human images from the last seventy-five years. Suggests that they are the heirs of modernism and accidental revolutionaries. Primarily concerned with mapping the values of the Bellow protagonist from this perspective.

• Hall, James. "The Revolving Brush: Blackness in Humboldt's Gift and The Bellarosa Connection." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 280-95.
  

  Argues that Bellow's bigoted self that makes him so uncomfortable each time it is revealed is not a repressed form that somehow erupts through his comforting bien penseés, although, as his writing reveals, there are repressions enough. Bellow's racism, while it worries at his liberal heart and principles, permeates much of his writing. It is part of the ideological machine that legitimates, even drives, his central persisting thesis. The differentiation between culture and the self, the social and the individual, mobilizes many of his novels and much contemporary American literary realism. Racial or ethnic imagery provides the leverage which forces that separation and is often central to the organization of these texts. Bellow sees Jewish life on the brink of the transcendent, fed as it is by Hasidic and Talmudic beliefs. The black life he depicts is constantly at rish of being sucked into catastrophe and the inferno. Blacks are at risk in a way Charlie Citrine never is. Middle class blacks are also invisible to Bellow. Bellow's immigrants ultimately do what they can to erase all memory of that relationship, as is instanced by Bellow's suppression of black history. It is a withdrawal into a morally corrupted private sphere partly determined by Bellow's age and infirmity, but the greater part is forced by personal and class failure in the struggle for existence. The struggle takes on a moral timbre only when it is undertaken on behalf of others. Bellow sold out when his own group gained high ground and he did not take up the struggle for other oppressed groups. Concludes that Bellow clothes that betrayal in the moral integrity of the individuals in the liberalism's defining sleight of hand.

• Halperin, Irving. "Saul Bellow and the Moral Imagination." Jewish Affairs 33.2 (1978): 33-36. Rpt. in Judaism 28.1 (1979): 23-30; New England Review I (1979): 475-88.
  

  Contains an imaginary conversation between Mr. Sammler and the author. The basic import of this is Halperin's delineation of the non-Manichean dimensions of Bellow's sophisticated moral imagination and affirmation of life.

• Hansen-Love, Friedrich. "Die Peripetien Saul Bellows." Merkur 31.1 (1977): 66-76.
  
  
• Harap, Louis. "From Life to Limbo: Saul Bellow." In the Mainstream: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature 1950s-1980s. Louis Harap. Contributions in Ethnic Studies 19. New York: Greenwood, 1987. 99-117.
  

  Articulates Bellow's initial Jewish affirmation of the value of life in the novels and then details the change which came over him in the sixties. Describes the "deepening cultural dislocation in the humanistic outlook among students and intellectuals, the suffocating domination of all the arts by the passion for profits, the wholesale evacuation of the inner cities by the white middle-class, and by the spread of a Black 'underclass' in an increasingly intensive technological society which did not employ them, and by the frighteningly rapid rise in the rate of crime . . ." (99).

• Harper, Gordon L. "Ideas and the Novel." Dialogue 2 (1969): 54-64.
  
  
• Harper, Howard M., Jr. "Saul Bellow—The Heart's Ultimate Need." Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin and Updike. Howard M. Harper, Jr. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1967. 7-64.
  

  An early and important general discussion on the issues of faith and crisis in the Bellow novel. Outlines most of the critical issues that will come to dominate Bellow criticism, including those of yearning for order, awareness of entropic forces, the city, loss of identity, existential dangling, modernism, and commitment.

• Harper, Howard M., Jr. "Trends in Recent American Fiction." Contemporary Literature 12.2 (1971): 204-29.
  

  Discusses a number of trends in post-war American fiction, including that of Saul Bellow. A major work in social and intellectual trends from modernism to post-modernism. Deals only briefly with Bellow's canon.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "Saul Bellow: Five Faces of a Hero." Critique 3.3 (1960): 28-36.
  

  Develops the thesis that Bellow's fiction keeps the everlasting Yes and the everlasting No in perpetual tension. Discusses Bellow's first five heroes from this perspective.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "Saul Bellow: The Quest and Affirmation of Reality." Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Ihab Hassan. Princeton, N J: Princeton UP, 1961. 290-324.
  

  Acclaims Bellow for being, both in a new and an old-fashioned sense, "a sustained fantasist of the real. " Discusses the plight of the Bellow hero faced with the cosmos he can scarcely apprehend, and yet who maintains a powerful sense of life that encompasses the cosmic and the quotidian. An erudite and classic early essay on the issues of affirmation and the void in the Bellow novel.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "Saul Bellow." American Writing Today. Voice of America Forum Series. Vol. 1. Washington: U.S. International Communication Agency, 1982. 115-26. 2 vols. Rpt. in American Writing Today. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. Troy: Whitston, 1991. 92-102.
  

  Praises Bellow for the universality of his work, traces his cultural origins, and provides a general assessment of Bellow's thematic directions and overall achievement as a novelist.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "The Way Down and Out." Virginia Quarterly Review 39.1 (1963): 81-93.
  

  Reflects on the spiritual state of American fiction in general and the fiction of Saul Bellow in particular. Primarily laments the distorted images of man as grotesque. Points out the irony of contemporary fiction depicting the way "down" as the way "out" of spiritual malaise.

• Hebert, Hugh. "Television: Hot air in the Windy City." Guardian 29 Jan. 1992: Features: 34.
  

  In this brief report of what seems to be a round table discussion with Bellow, Comer Cruise O'Brien, Gore Vidal and Manio Vargas Llosa present, Bellow is reported as being deeply concerned about the threat of political correctness and multiculturalism, the depletion of personal life, and the production of too many non-persons.

• Heiney, Donald. "Bellow as European." Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium: Modern American Fiction: Insights and Foreign Lights, Jan. 27-28, 1972. Eds. Wolodymyr T. Zyla and Wendall M. Aycock. Lubbock, TX: Texas Technical University, 1972. 77-88.
  

  Admits the usefulness of seeing Bellow within an American literary context and even within a Jewish context. Asserts, however, that to see him within a European context is to see certain matters that have been overlooked in the previous approaches, namely the pastoral impulse and Rousseauistic traits such as notions of the noble savage, primitivism, and innocence.

• Hilfer, Tony. "Saul Bellow: High Principles and Low Facts in Chicago and New York." American Fiction since 1940. Longman Literature in English Series. London: Longman, 1992. 74-97.
  

  Asserts that Bellow is the most resourceful American novelist since Faulkner in his use of his historical situation. Reviews Bellow's early life, his intellectual working against prevailing doctrine, the early novels, the dialectic movement of the middle and later novels, and his lovely imagining of higher things. Mostly a brief recounting of established critical opinion.

• Hirsch, David H. "Jewish Identity and Jewish Suffering in Bellow, Malamud and Philip Roth." Jewish Book Annual. 29th. ed. New York: Jewish Book Council, 1971. 12-22.
  
  
• Hoagland, Edward. "Like a Bellow Character." Salmagundi 106-07 (1995): 71-73.
  

  Contains a brief tribute to Bellow in which Hoagland traces his own biography in terms of various Bellow novels. Concludes that Moses Herzog, Eugene Henderson, Augie March, Tommy Wilhelm, and Charlie Citrine were emblems of anxious decades and remain good friends whom one can remember nowadays as we move on to new anxieties.

• Hoffman, Frederick J. "The Fool of Experience: Saul Bellow's Fiction." Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1964. 80-94.
  

  Talks about the ludicrous and the absurd in the experience of the Bellow hero. Traces this sense of the absurd to the Eastern European shtetl. Also deals with issues of affirmation and denial in the novels.

• Hogel, Rolf. "The 'International Theme' in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Literatur in Wissenschaft and Underricht 23.3 (1990): 233-47.
  

  Examines MDH as a turning point in Bellow's depiction of Europe and France to the extent that it implies nothing less than a revival of the "international theme" developed so masterfully by Henry James. Traces the development of this theme through several of James's novels and then chronologically through the Bellow canon. Looks particularly at MSP and MDH as giving the theme of internationalism Jamesian scope. Comments on how Bellow presents Europe as both geography and intellectual force affecting the thoughts and actions of modern people, including Americans. Concludes that James's and Bellow's treatments of this theme are, consistent insofar as they present differences which invariably exist between American and Europeans and the strong fascination exerted on Americans by the Old World's culture, sophistication, and history.

• Ho, Hsin. So-erh Pei-lou yen chiu. [np: 1976.]
  
  
• Hollahan, Eugene. "Bellow's Affirmation of Individual Value Via Classical Plot Structure." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 23-31.
  

  Contains information concerning the frequency of the word "crisis" in the Bellow novel and its ramifications for understanding Bellow's themes. These ideas are treated in a much more lengthy article published in the following year in Studies in the Novel.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Career of a Crisis-Watcher: Saul Bellow." Crisis-Consciousness and theNovel. Eugene Hollahan. Newark: U of Delaware; London: Assoc. UP, 1992. 207-37.
  

  In a mapping of the crisis trope in modern literature and consciousness, argues that Bellow fiction focuses very deliberately on crisis within the American psyche. Provides a rhetorical accounting of Bellow's use of this word from DM (1944) to MDH (1987). Concludes that more than any other novelist, Bellow argues that the valuable word "crisis" has become a fashionable gesture.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Crisis' in Bellow's Novels: Some Data and a Conjecture." Studies in theNovel 15.3 (1983): 249-64
  

  Provides an erudite etymology of the word "crisis." Then shows how often this word figured in the works of Smollett, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and, more recently, in the works of Robert Coover. In Bellow, as in these other writers, the word itself establishes a pattern. It has been a crucial part of his experimentation and development as an affirmative thinker in the novelistic form. Hollahan provides an extended and sophisticated definition of the word, as well as a frequency chart for the number of times the word appears in individual Bellow novels. Shows how Bellow uses the word in increasingly complex ways. Each novel is seen as being marked by a crisis or turning point that functions to elaborate a developmental concept regarding the value of the individual. Bellow's fusion of the great tradition with modern culture seems to center on the problem of crisis-consciousness and individual action. Concludes that these crisis-centered plots may represent one of his most generous gifts to his beleaguered fellow men.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Design as Defense: Saul Bellow's Classical Plots as Defenses of the Beleaguered Modern Individual." Design, Pattern, Style: Hallmarks of a Developing American Culture. Ed. Don Harkness. Tampa, FL: American Studies Press, 1983. 44-45.
  
  
• Hollahan, Eugene. "Editor's Comment." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 1-5.
  

  Contains a very rational and erudite defense of studying literature from a philosophical perspective. Discusses the synthesis of thought and feeling in Wordsworth and goes on to discuss Bellow's relationship to that tradition. A very useful overview of Bellow's philosophical roots, and of the articles which follow in this special Bellow issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Introduction: Looking For the Center." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. xv-xxiii
  

  Invokes the image of Yeat's center that cannot hold, and speaks of Bellow's constant struggle toward some imagined aesthetic and spiritual center where mankind struggles for a fuller and more coherent humanity against forces chaos. Places Bellow in company with a long line of distinguished Western writers and philosophers he calls "crisis-rhetoricians." Notes Bellow's frequent invocation of the crisis trope while in his frequent analyses of hysterical escapism in face of public crisis which threatens to eclipse the private sphere. Asserts that Bellow understands the center is located in literature, and concludes that consciousness itself constitutes another Bellow center which is often represented in the typical Bellovian polarity of remembering and forgetting.

• Hollander, Paul. "Models and Mentors." Modern Age 37.4 (1995): 322-29.
  

  Argues, within the context of an essay on the influence and importance of mentors, how role models and tutors pay tribute to Saul Bellow's influence and inspiration. Makes particular reference to Bellow's descriptions of the human condition, the futility of utopian-revolutionary dreams, intimate forms of frustration, endless striving for transcendence, and critique of modern individualism.

• Howe, Irving. "Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction." Partisan Review 26.3 (1959): 420-36. Rpt. in A World More Attractive. Irving Howe. New York: Horizon, 1963. 77-97.
  

  Provides a definition of mass society and post-modern society by first outlining the concerns of Dostoevsky and then showing similarities and differences in the work of post-modern writers like Bellow. Modern writers, according to Howe, assumed the existence of values which could be tested in the novel by "dramatizing the relationships between mobile characters and fixed social groups." In the post-modern period mass society has obliterated these distinctions and, hence, presented the writer with a very different set of social assumptions. Deals with Bellow and several other post-modern writers.

• Heuermann, Hartmut. Mythos, Literatur, Gesellschafi. Mythokritische Analysen zur Geschichte des amerikanischen Romans. Mtinchen: Fink, 1988.
  
  
• Hux, Samuel. "Character and Form in Bellow." Forum [Houston] 12.1 (1974): 34-38.
  

  Commends Bellow as being a writer truly in charge of his form, despite his apparently anarchic and anti-literary qualities. This expansiveness is one of Bellow's strengths. Goes on to describe formalistically the relationship between the theory of form and Bellow's particular style of characterization.

• Hall, James. "Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Creating, Self-Vindicating, High Energy Man: Saul Bellow." The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room: The British and American Novel Since 1930. James Hall. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1968. 127-80.
  

  Discusses the characters as "walking syntheses of modernism." Hall claims they differ from other modern heroes in that they consider themselves problem-solvers and refuse to remain passive. Claims that they are high-energy men who contain within themselves layers and layers of ideal human images from the last seventy-five years. Suggests that they are the heirs of modernism and accidental revolutionaries. Primarily concerned with mapping the values of the Bellow protagonist from this perspective.

• Hall, James. "The Revolving Brush: Blackness in Humboldt's Gift and The Bellarosa Connection." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 280-95.
  

  Argues that Bellow's bigoted self that makes him so uncomfortable each time it is revealed is not a repressed form that somehow erupts through his comforting bien penseés, although, as his writing reveals, there are repressions enough. Bellow's racism, while it worries at his liberal heart and principles, permeates much of his writing. It is part of the ideological machine that legitimates, even drives, his central persisting thesis. The differentiation between culture and the self, the social and the individual, mobilizes many of his novels and much contemporary American literary realism. Racial or ethnic imagery provides the leverage which forces that separation and is often central to the organization of these texts. Bellow sees Jewish life on the brink of the transcendent, fed as it is by Hasidic and Talmudic beliefs. The black life he depicts is constantly at rish of being sucked into catastrophe and the inferno. Blacks are at risk in a way Charlie Citrine never is. Middle class blacks are also invisible to Bellow. Bellow's immigrants ultimately do what they can to erase all memory of that relationship, as is instanced by Bellow's suppression of black history. It is a withdrawal into a morally corrupted private sphere partly determined by Bellow's age and infirmity, but the greater part is forced by personal and class failure in the struggle for existence. The struggle takes on a moral timbre only when it is undertaken on behalf of others. Bellow sold out when his own group gained high ground and he did not take up the struggle for other oppressed groups. Concludes that Bellow clothes that betrayal in the moral integrity of the individuals in the liberalism's defining sleight of hand.

• Halperin, Irving. "Saul Bellow and the Moral Imagination." Jewish Affairs 33.2 (1978): 33-36. Rpt. in Judaism 28.1 (1979): 23-30; New England Review I (1979): 475-88.
  

  Contains an imaginary conversation between Mr. Sammler and the author. The basic import of this is Halperin's delineation of the non-Manichean dimensions of Bellow's sophisticated moral imagination and affirmation of life.

• Hansen-Love, Friedrich. "Die Peripetien Saul Bellows." Merkur 31.1 (1977): 66-76.
  
  
• Harap, Louis. "From Life to Limbo: Saul Bellow." In the Mainstream: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature 1950s-1980s. Louis Harap. Contributions in Ethnic Studies 19. New York: Greenwood, 1987. 99-117.
  

  Articulates Bellow's initial Jewish affirmation of the value of life in the novels and then details the change which came over him in the sixties. Describes the "deepening cultural dislocation in the humanistic outlook among students and intellectuals, the suffocating domination of all the arts by the passion for profits, the wholesale evacuation of the inner cities by the white middle-class, and by the spread of a Black 'underclass' in an increasingly intensive technological society which did not employ them, and by the frighteningly rapid rise in the rate of crime . . ." (99).

• Harper, Gordon L. "Ideas and the Novel." Dialogue 2 (1969): 54-64.
  
  
• Harper, Howard M., Jr. "Saul Bellow—The Heart's Ultimate Need." Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin and Updike. Howard M. Harper, Jr. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1967. 7-64.
  

  An early and important general discussion on the issues of faith and crisis in the Bellow novel. Outlines most of the critical issues that will come to dominate Bellow criticism, including those of yearning for order, awareness of entropic forces, the city, loss of identity, existential dangling, modernism, and commitment.

• Harper, Howard M., Jr. "Trends in Recent American Fiction." Contemporary Literature 12.2 (1971): 204-29.
  

  Discusses a number of trends in post-war American fiction, including that of Saul Bellow. A major work in social and intellectual trends from modernism to post-modernism. Deals only briefly with Bellow's canon.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "Saul Bellow: Five Faces of a Hero." Critique 3.3 (1960): 28-36.
  

  Develops the thesis that Bellow's fiction keeps the everlasting Yes and the everlasting No in perpetual tension. Discusses Bellow's first five heroes from this perspective.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "Saul Bellow: The Quest and Affirmation of Reality." Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Ihab Hassan. Princeton, N J: Princeton UP, 1961. 290-324.
  

  Acclaims Bellow for being, both in a new and an old-fashioned sense, "a sustained fantasist of the real. " Discusses the plight of the Bellow hero faced with the cosmos he can scarcely apprehend, and yet who maintains a powerful sense of life that encompasses the cosmic and the quotidian. An erudite and classic early essay on the issues of affirmation and the void in the Bellow novel.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "Saul Bellow." American Writing Today. Voice of America Forum Series. Vol. 1. Washington: U.S. International Communication Agency, 1982. 115-26. 2 vols. Rpt. in American Writing Today. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. Troy: Whitston, 1991. 92-102.
  

  Praises Bellow for the universality of his work, traces his cultural origins, and provides a general assessment of Bellow's thematic directions and overall achievement as a novelist.

• Hassan, Ihab H. "The Way Down and Out." Virginia Quarterly Review 39.1 (1963): 81-93.
  

  Reflects on the spiritual state of American fiction in general and the fiction of Saul Bellow in particular. Primarily laments the distorted images of man as grotesque. Points out the irony of contemporary fiction depicting the way "down" as the way "out" of spiritual malaise.

• Hebert, Hugh. "Television: Hot air in the Windy City." Guardian 29 Jan. 1992: Features: 34.
  

  In this brief report of what seems to be a round table discussion with Bellow, Comer Cruise O'Brien, Gore Vidal and Manio Vargas Llosa present, Bellow is reported as being deeply concerned about the threat of political correctness and multiculturalism, the depletion of personal life, and the production of too many non-persons.

• Heiney, Donald. "Bellow as European." Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium: Modern American Fiction: Insights and Foreign Lights, Jan. 27-28, 1972. Eds. Wolodymyr T. Zyla and Wendall M. Aycock. Lubbock, TX: Texas Technical University, 1972. 77-88.
  

  Admits the usefulness of seeing Bellow within an American literary context and even within a Jewish context. Asserts, however, that to see him within a European context is to see certain matters that have been overlooked in the previous approaches, namely the pastoral impulse and Rousseauistic traits such as notions of the noble savage, primitivism, and innocence.

• Hilfer, Tony. "Saul Bellow: High Principles and Low Facts in Chicago and New York." American Fiction since 1940. Longman Literature in English Series. London: Longman, 1992. 74-97.
  

  Asserts that Bellow is the most resourceful American novelist since Faulkner in his use of his historical situation. Reviews Bellow's early life, his intellectual working against prevailing doctrine, the early novels, the dialectic movement of the middle and later novels, and his lovely imagining of higher things. Mostly a brief recounting of established critical opinion.

• Hirsch, David H. "Jewish Identity and Jewish Suffering in Bellow, Malamud and Philip Roth." Jewish Book Annual. 29th. ed. New York: Jewish Book Council, 1971. 12-22.
  
  
• Hoagland, Edward. "Like a Bellow Character." Salmagundi 106-07 (1995): 71-73.
  

  Contains a brief tribute to Bellow in which Hoagland traces his own biography in terms of various Bellow novels. Concludes that Moses Herzog, Eugene Henderson, Augie March, Tommy Wilhelm, and Charlie Citrine were emblems of anxious decades and remain good friends whom one can remember nowadays as we move on to new anxieties.

• Hoffman, Frederick J. "The Fool of Experience: Saul Bellow's Fiction." Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1964. 80-94.
  

  Talks about the ludicrous and the absurd in the experience of the Bellow hero. Traces this sense of the absurd to the Eastern European shtetl. Also deals with issues of affirmation and denial in the novels.

• Hogel, Rolf. "The 'International Theme' in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Literatur in Wissenschaft and Underricht 23.3 (1990): 233-47.
  

  Examines MDH as a turning point in Bellow's depiction of Europe and France to the extent that it implies nothing less than a revival of the "international theme" developed so masterfully by Henry James. Traces the development of this theme through several of James's novels and then chronologically through the Bellow canon. Looks particularly at MSP and MDH as giving the theme of internationalism Jamesian scope. Comments on how Bellow presents Europe as both geography and intellectual force affecting the thoughts and actions of modern people, including Americans. Concludes that James's and Bellow's treatments of this theme are, consistent insofar as they present differences which invariably exist between American and Europeans and the strong fascination exerted on Americans by the Old World's culture, sophistication, and history.

• Ho, Hsin. So-erh Pei-lou yen chiu. [np: 1976.]
  
  
• Hollahan, Eugene. "Bellow's Affirmation of Individual Value Via Classical Plot Structure." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 23-31.
  

  Contains information concerning the frequency of the word "crisis" in the Bellow novel and its ramifications for understanding Bellow's themes. These ideas are treated in a much more lengthy article published in the following year in Studies in the Novel.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Career of a Crisis-Watcher: Saul Bellow." Crisis-Consciousness and theNovel. Eugene Hollahan. Newark: U of Delaware; London: Assoc. UP, 1992. 207-37.
  

  In a mapping of the crisis trope in modern literature and consciousness, argues that Bellow fiction focuses very deliberately on crisis within the American psyche. Provides a rhetorical accounting of Bellow's use of this word from DM (1944) to MDH (1987). Concludes that more than any other novelist, Bellow argues that the valuable word "crisis" has become a fashionable gesture.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Crisis' in Bellow's Novels: Some Data and a Conjecture." Studies in theNovel 15.3 (1983): 249-64
  

  Provides an erudite etymology of the word "crisis." Then shows how often this word figured in the works of Smollett, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and, more recently, in the works of Robert Coover. In Bellow, as in these other writers, the word itself establishes a pattern. It has been a crucial part of his experimentation and development as an affirmative thinker in the novelistic form. Hollahan provides an extended and sophisticated definition of the word, as well as a frequency chart for the number of times the word appears in individual Bellow novels. Shows how Bellow uses the word in increasingly complex ways. Each novel is seen as being marked by a crisis or turning point that functions to elaborate a developmental concept regarding the value of the individual. Bellow's fusion of the great tradition with modern culture seems to center on the problem of crisis-consciousness and individual action. Concludes that these crisis-centered plots may represent one of his most generous gifts to his beleaguered fellow men.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Design as Defense: Saul Bellow's Classical Plots as Defenses of the Beleaguered Modern Individual." Design, Pattern, Style: Hallmarks of a Developing American Culture. Ed. Don Harkness. Tampa, FL: American Studies Press, 1983. 44-45.
  
  
• Hollahan, Eugene. "Editor's Comment." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 1-5.
  

  Contains a very rational and erudite defense of studying literature from a philosophical perspective. Discusses the synthesis of thought and feeling in Wordsworth and goes on to discuss Bellow's relationship to that tradition. A very useful overview of Bellow's philosophical roots, and of the articles which follow in this special Bellow issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination.

• Hollahan, Eugene. "Introduction: Looking For the Center." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. xv-xxiii
  

  Invokes the image of Yeat's center that cannot hold, and speaks of Bellow's constant struggle toward some imagined aesthetic and spiritual center where mankind struggles for a fuller and more coherent humanity against forces chaos. Places Bellow in company with a long line of distinguished Western writers and philosophers he calls "crisis-rhetoricians." Notes Bellow's frequent invocation of the crisis trope while in his frequent analyses of hysterical escapism in face of public crisis which threatens to eclipse the private sphere. Asserts that Bellow understands the center is located in literature, and concludes that consciousness itself constitutes another Bellow center which is often represented in the typical Bellovian polarity of remembering and forgetting.

• Hollander, Paul. "Models and Mentors." Modern Age 37.4 (1995): 322-29.
  

  Argues, within the context of an essay on the influence and importance of mentors, how role models and tutors pay tribute to Saul Bellow's influence and inspiration. Makes particular reference to Bellow's descriptions of the human condition, the futility of utopian-revolutionary dreams, intimate forms of frustration, endless striving for transcendence, and critique of modern individualism.

• Howe, Irving. "Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction." Partisan Review 26.3 (1959): 420-36. Rpt. in A World More Attractive. Irving Howe. New York: Horizon, 1963. 77-97.
  

  Provides a definition of mass society and post-modern society by first outlining the concerns of Dostoevsky and then showing similarities and differences in the work of post-modern writers like Bellow. Modern writers, according to Howe, assumed the existence of values which could be tested in the novel by "dramatizing the relationships between mobile characters and fixed social groups." In the post-modern period mass society has obliterated these distinctions and, hence, presented the writer with a very different set of social assumptions. Deals with Bellow and several other post-modern writers.

• Heuermann, Hartmut. Mythos, Literatur, Gesellschafi. Mythokritische Analysen zur Geschichte des amerikanischen Romans. Mtinchen: Fink, 1988.
  
  
• Hux, Samuel. "Character and Form in Bellow." Forum [Houston] 12.1 (1974): 34-38.
  

  Commends Bellow as being a writer truly in charge of his form, despite his apparently anarchic and anti-literary qualities. This expansiveness is one of Bellow's strengths. Goes on to describe formalistically the relationship between the theory of form and Bellow's particular style of characterization.

• Kannan, Lhkshmi. "The Confessional Strain in Saul Beilow's Fiction." Journal of the Department of English [Calcutta] 15.1 (1979-80): 86-92.
  

  Commends Bellow for being able to create and sustain the urgency of personal, individual, and private voice in each of his protagonists. Briefly traces the history of the confessional mode of literary discourse from St. Augustine forward. Also relates this mode to modern theories of knowledge such as those of F. H. Bradley and William James. Describes its advantages with regard to irony. Proceeds chronologically through each of these novels.

• Kannan, Lakshmi. "The 'Infected' Area in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Literary Half-Yearly 18.2 (1978): 103-19.
  

  Points up the neglect by formalist criticism of the subjective or "infected" area of Bellow's fiction. Proceeds to discuss the advantages of subjectivism to the novelist and critic.

• Kannan, Lakshmi. "That Small Voice in Bellow's Fiction." Visvabharati Quarterly [India] 42 (1977): 191-206.
  

  Discusses Bellow's tendency to uphold the value of the individual against the superstructure of mass society. Discusses subjectivism as the small voice which speaks through the novels.

• Kaplan, Morton A. "Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss." World and I Aug 2000: 11-13.
  
  
• Karl, Frederick R. American Fiction 1940/1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper, 1983. 31-34, 84-87, 118-20, 254-59, 329-37, 488-92, passim.
  

  Argues that apanning the post-1950s moment, the author weaves numerous references to a variety of Bellow works into nearly all of his chapters. It is a literary historical mapping organized by decades and also by themes in American fictions. Useful for locating Bellow among fellow writers.

• Karl, Frederick R. "Bellow's Comic 'Last Men.'" Thalia 1.2 (1978): 19-26.
  

  Describes the Bellow novel as one in which surface irony, wit and comedy and subsurface "endless tunnels of torment and pain in the Kafkaesque mode" are constantly in tension. Discusses the thesis in H, MSP, and HG.

• Karl, Frederick R. "Picaresque and the American Experience." Yale Review 57.2 (1968): 196-212.
  

  Begins with a review of James' influence on the structure of the novel, provides a historical survey of the European picaresque form, and then relates both traditions to the unique circumstances of the American tradition. Demonstrates how the tradition of the American anti-heroic picaro develops and briefly deals with the Bellow picaro within this framework.

• Kazin, Alfred. "Absurdity as a Contemporary Style." Mediterranean 1.3 (1971): 39-46. Revised version rpt. as "The Absurd as a Contemporary Style: Ellison to Pynchon" in Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Ed. Alfred Kazin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 243-81.
  
  
• Kazin, Alfred. "Bellow's Purgatory." New York Review of Books 28 Mar. 1968: 32-36.
  
  
• Kazin, Alfred. "The Earthly City of the Jews: Bellow to Singer." Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Alfred Kazin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 125-62. Rpt. Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 28-46.
  
  
• Kazin, Alfred. "The World of Saul Bellow." Contemporaries. Alfred Kazin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. 217-23.
  

  A brief introduction to the Bellow novel.

• Kennedy, Eugene. "Say It Isn't So: Another Legend Leaves Chicago." Chicago Tribune 24 May 1993: 1: 13.
  

  An article discussing the loss to Chicago of Saul Bellow. Argues that the University of Chicago should not have allowed this to happen. Also discusses what questions this raises about a city that can remember its gangsters better than its writers. Notes that future Chicago generations will have to read Bellow to find out about their city, as people now read Dickens for information about the London of his day. Concludes that in a mock trial on Judgment Day St. Peter will ask, "And you did not protest television news committing murder at 6 pm every night, but you did let Mr. Bellow go?"

• Kiernan, Robert F. "The Styles of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 91-100.
  

  Discusses Bellow's early 1950's pronounciative style of the French existentialists, and progression towards the more ample and rhetorically indulgent nineteenth-century style. Argues that as early as DM an interaction of one style with the other is evident. Sees this as the influence of existentialism and Hemingwayesque modernism-a pronounciative ipse dixit tone based on a reductive use of syntax and chiaroscuro interplay of philosophical abstractions with vernacular speech, ungrammatical repetition, rich assertions, robust declaration, parallelism, and metaphorical playfulness. Traces this mix through the major works, and concludes that within Bellow's work the nineteenth century pronounciative style always contends with the amplified style, although Bellow continued a modernist experimental style from the 1950's on. Concludes that no device of characterization has transformed his discordant metaphysical awareness more strategically than the stylistic variations that are their symbol and cipher.

• Kim, Kyung-ae. "The Bellowian Self." Journal of English Language and Literature [Korea] 44.4 (1998): 771-88.
  

  A lengthy examination of Bellow's quest for the ground of selfhood and its purposes. Treats a variety of topics such as conflicting notions of self, egocentric selves, dubious selves, historically enmeshed selves, romantic selves, original selves, primitive selves, visionary gifts, cosmic correspondances, spiritual forces, and radical transcendence. Concludes that Bellow's novels break with the fundamental dichotomy of the Western mind by seeking a redeeming vision in epiphanic moments beyond all of the seer/seen, knower/know, I/you, distinctions.

• Klein, Jeffrey. "Armies of the Planet: A Comparative Analysis of Norman Mailer's and Saul Bellow's Political Visions." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 58.1 (1975): 69-83.
  

  Believes that both Bellow and Mailer had recognized by the late 1960's that the most serious threat to America was not the Vietcong or the counter-culture and Black power movements, but the failure of the traditional WASP culture. Analyzes MSP and other novels from this perspective.

• Klein, Marcus. "A Discipline of Nobility: Saul Bellow's Fiction." Kenyon Review 24.2 (1962): 203-26. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow: A Discipline of Nobility." After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century. Marcus Klein. New York: World, 1964. 33-70; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970; Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978; Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 92-113; Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Irving Malin. Twentieth Century Views. Edglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1978. 135-60.
  

  Sees Bellow's fiction as moving, along with much other fiction of the 1950's and 1960's, from alienation to accommodation. Bellow's work, however, is more imaginative and severe. Each hero must meet with a strong sense of self, the sacrifice of self demanded by social circumstance. Discusses in detail the demanding world of the protagonists in each of the novels.

• Klug, M. A. "Saul Bellow: The Hero in the Middle." Dalhousie Review 56.3 (1976): 462-78. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 181-94.
  

  Suggests that from the beginning of his career, Bellow has consciously tried to avoid what he sees as extremes of the modern American tradition and at the same time to work those extremes as the central conflict within his own work. Locates the Bellow hero squarely between the romantic tradition of triumph and the naturalistic tradition of inevitable defeat.

• Knopp, Josephine Zadovsky. "Jewish America: Saul Bellow." The Trial of Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Writing. Josephine Zadovsky Knopp. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1975. 126-56.
  

  Argues that the fictional world of Saul Bellow has often been discussed from the point of view of its relationship to the works of Roth and Malamud, but despite some obvious similarities in their treatment of moral tensions inherent in Jewish life in America, that there are many valid comparisons to be made between the religious Hassidic mysticism of Elie Wiesel and the secular mysticism of Bellow. Discusses Leventhal's victimization, Herzog's roots in the European shtetl, Sammler's newfound God-conscious pieties, Elya's Jewishness, and the importance of Meister Eckhardt to Mr. Sammler. Concludes that Bellow seems to be suggesting that Jewish historical consciousness provides a "potent counter to doctrines of despair."

• Kondo, Kyoko. "Pursuit of One Theme: Saul Bellow's Early Novels, Dangling Man, The Victim and Seize the Day." Sophia English Studies [Japan] 3 (1978): 86-98. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1981.
  
  
• Kort, Wesley A. "Simplicity and Complexity in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Moral Fiber: Character and Belief in Recent American Fiction. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982. 74-83.
  
  
• Kraus, Joe W. "Collecting Saul Bellow: Some Questions and Answers." A. B. Bookman's Weekly 27 Jan. 1992: 233-34.
  

  A brief journalistic piece in which Kraus recounts his Bellow book collecting, his deep-felt appreciation for Bellow's lasting power, and recent publications. Notes that Bellow has produced about fifty short stories, several plays, about one hundred and forty essays and other pieces, ten book prefaces and much editing, as well as inspired over fifty books about himself. Discusses his own current projects: (1) a dictionary of characters, and (2) an author bibliography on Bellow.

• Kramer, Hilton. "Saul Bellow, Our Contemporary." Commentary June 1994: 37-41. Rpt. in The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War. Hilton Kramer. Chicago: Dee, 1999. 167-80.
  

  Describes how he and his generation eagerly received each one of Bellow's first few novels up to the publication of Herzog, a penultimate novel which he and his generation of Jewish intellectuals saw as defining their world. Then describes their perception of the courageous, sagacious, and prophetic qualities of MSP, which they saw as descriptive of the moral collapse of New York and of the emancipated Jewish middle-class fundamental to the Jewish intellectuals of his and Bellow's generation. Explains how he then drops out of the Bellow fan club with the publication of HG and registers his distrust of Bellow's fable of Delmore Schwartz's life. Describes HG as an extended exercise in self-exoneration, and complains that Bellow's subsequent books seemed bent settling old scores and trying out metaphysical roles. From this autobiographical and historical persepctive he locates his assessment of IAAU, which he describes as containing things both "Herzogian" at their best and bogged down in the "moronic inferno" at their worst. Notes that from the Jefferson lectures through all of these pieces there is something unacknowledged–something offstage that sparks his indignation without ever being openly confronted or identified, something about the true sources of his anger. Writes of Bellow's early welcome by the Partisan Review and his later withering condescension toward them. Wonders about Bellow's scorn for the fallacies of Marxism and his suspicious silence on the subject at the time. Criticizes him for not being able to write the moral history of the Russian immigrants of his day, though recently it seems Bellow cannot stop talking about it in his 1990-1991 interviews–only one of the losses we are reminded of in IAAU. Criticizes also Bellow's fixation on degraded popular culture, the media's culpability, and its distractions, because he seems to trivialize this malevolent phenomenon by reducing it to merely a major distraction for writers and intellectuals who are thereby deprived of an audience. Describes Bellow as ultimately inhabiting an invisible political place between the disabuses of a liberalism he clings to and the neo-conservatism he both embraces and spurns–a space of intellectual refuge for a dwindling remnant of homeless liberals who identify their survival with a refusal of affiliation. Provides a detailed account of the attacks on Bellow as a racist and university intellectual, and criticizes Bellow's rather feeble responses. He accuses Bellow of remaining our contemporary in his copping-out on such explosive topics as multiculturalism and political correctness.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Memoir and History: Saul Bellow's Old Men Remembering in 'Mosby's Memoirs,' 'The Old System,' and The Bellarosa Connection." Saul Bellow Journal 12.2 (1994): 44-58.
  

  Suggests that Bellow's exploration of the significance of memory through short fictions is revealed in three stories of old men remembering the past: Willis Mosby (MM), Samuel Braun (TOS), and the unnammed narrator in BC. Each protagonist considers a person or people in his past, either in obliviousness to memory's relevance, or in appreciation of its significance. Unlike Mosby, who remains blind and deaf to the meaning of human suffering, the narrator or BC redeems himself through his self-lacerating memoir. The reverential Jewish tone and context which close the narrative address the importance of relating to one's particular historic/cultural memory, and place memory in the sphere of religious obligation.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Saul Bellow's Remembrance of Jewish Times Past: Herzog and 'The Old System.'" Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 101-17.
  

  Claims that Bellow's fiction, emanating as it so richly does from his Jewishness, engages the universal. His thought, language, history, themes, characters, constructs, style, imagery, allusions, and tone all reflect the influence of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures. Traces these influences in considerable detail through both "The Old System," and H—particularly with reference to their common Montreal connections. Concludes that like Malamud, Singer, Ozick, and other Jewish American authors who write in the mode of redemptive spiritual return, Bellow consistently affirms humankind's spiritual capacity and ethical potential, and nowhere more forcefully than in "The Old System" which he identifies as a favorite among his own works.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Scars of Outrage: The Holocaust in The Victim and Mr. Saramler's Planet." Witness through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature. S. Lillian Kremer. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989. 36-62.
  

  Claims that Bellow was at the forefront of American readiness to address antisemitism in literature. Demonstrates that throughout the canon he presents the theme of antisemitism dramatically, allusively, and symbolically. Notes that though it is a subdued component, it is ever present in the fiction. Traces the elements chronologically through the novels. Concludes that fiction's retreat to aesthetics, its tendency to be its own source, is something Bellow has attacked.

• Kretzer, Birgit Erika, ed. Idealitat und Realitat der Frauenfiguren ira modernen amerikanischen Roman: Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, John Hawkes: literarische Bezuge zewischen Wirklichkeits- und Vorstellengsstrukturerz. Europaische Hochschulschriften. Reihe XIV, Angelsachsische Sprache und Literatur, Bd. 197/European University Studies. Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 197. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 1989. [In German.]
  
  
• Kreutzer, Eberhard. "'World City': Cosmopolis und Schmelztiegel." New York in der zeitgenössischen Amerikanischen erzählliteratur [New York in Contemporary American Fiction}. Anglistische Forschungen 182. Heidelberg: Winter, 1985. 200-22. Passim.
  
  
• Krupnick, Mark. "He Never Learned to Swim." New Review 2.22 (1976): 33-39.
  

  Discusses the literary career of Philip Rahv and the publication Modern Occasions. Also contains an entertaining and accurate account of Bellow's literary criticism which appeared in the journal. Places Bellow's jeremiad on modern media intellectuals in a historical and cultural framework.

• Kulshrestha, Chirantan. "The Bellow Gyroscope: Letters to Richard G. Stern." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 36-43.
  

  Suggests that Bellow's letters to Richard Stern provide a penetrating glimpse of his creative anxieties, his creative problem-solving in writing, and his growing belief in the affirmative power of art. In addition, they record the progress of a warm, self-revealing relationship on Bellow's part. These letters span the crucial period following the publication of SD and "bristle with aspirations, uncertainties, and contemplated strategies." Here Bellow tests many of his embryonic theories of the role of the artist, using Stern as sounding board. The letters relating to the period surrounding the writing of HRK show his deepening awareness as an artist. They are also frank and full of unselfconscious personal information. In addition, they contain many of Bellow's responses to Stern's own novels.

• Kulshrestha, Chirantan. "The Making of Saul Bellow's Fiction: Notes from the Underground." American Studies International 19.2 (1981): 48-56.
  

  A brief article reporting Kulshrestha's findings in the Bellow files at the Department of Special Collections at the University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library.

• Kumar, Shiv. "Chapter One: Saul Bellow and the Hebraic Prophetic Tradition." Tablet Breakers in the American Wilderness.
  

  Defines the prophetic temper as marked by an uncompromising and fearless struggle against tyranny, injustice, and evil in human society, and as that temper which asserted moral force against the vagaries of popular culture, thereby humanizing mankind. Places Saul Bellow in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets insofar as he upholds the primacy of mortality in all his writings. Within the simulacrum of literary modernism, his writings are a vital counterforce. Argues that he lays bare the barren aestheticism of modernism and its preoccupations with style, its dehumanizing tendencies, centerless subjectivity, and its refusal of moral vision. An elaborate close reading of Bellow's in moral vision as it extends also out of shtetl faith, romantic affirmation, and a refusal of rationalism.

• Kumar, P. Shiv. "From Kavanah to Mitzvah: A Perspective on Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Indian Journal of American Studies 10.2 (1980): 30-39.
  

  Argues that Herzog lives by a code he calls his "law of the heart," whereas Mr. Sammler lives in search of the higher terms of his contracts. H is the last of a line of novels searching for the basic law, while MSP is the beginning of a new kind of search for "higher activity."

• Kumar, P. Shiv. "Saul Bellow and the Hebraic Prophetic Tradition." Journal of English Studies [India] 11.2 (1980): 756-65. Rpt. as "The Hero and the Prophet: A Study of Bellow's Fiction." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 137-49.
  

  Rather loosely defines the Hebraic prophetic tradition in terms of prophecy, emphasis on moral perfectability of man, rejection of ritual, primacy of morality over cultic practices of popular religion, indifference toward theological speculation, the achievement of oneness and of belonging to the humanity of his existence, and the coming Messianic age. Proceeds to discuss Bellow's views on the relation of art and artist in society to this Hebraic sense of life. Discusses also Bellow's optimism, his belief in the universe as planned and ordered, and his belief in humankind as indicative of the influence of the Hebraic prophetic tradition.

• Kyria, Pierre. "Le Monde Americain." Revue de Paris Mar. 1967: 120-25.
  
  
• Kannan, Lhkshmi. "The Confessional Strain in Saul Beilow's Fiction." Journal of the Department of English [Calcutta] 15.1 (1979-80): 86-92.
  

  Commends Bellow for being able to create and sustain the urgency of personal, individual, and private voice in each of his protagonists. Briefly traces the history of the confessional mode of literary discourse from St. Augustine forward. Also relates this mode to modern theories of knowledge such as those of F. H. Bradley and William James. Describes its advantages with regard to irony. Proceeds chronologically through each of these novels.

• Kannan, Lakshmi. "The 'Infected' Area in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Literary Half-Yearly 18.2 (1978): 103-19.
  

  Points up the neglect by formalist criticism of the subjective or "infected" area of Bellow's fiction. Proceeds to discuss the advantages of subjectivism to the novelist and critic.

• Kannan, Lakshmi. "That Small Voice in Bellow's Fiction." Visvabharati Quarterly [India] 42 (1977): 191-206.
  

  Discusses Bellow's tendency to uphold the value of the individual against the superstructure of mass society. Discusses subjectivism as the small voice which speaks through the novels.

• Kaplan, Morton A. "Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss." World and I Aug 2000: 11-13.
  
  
• Karl, Frederick R. American Fiction 1940/1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper, 1983. 31-34, 84-87, 118-20, 254-59, 329-37, 488-92, passim.
  

  Argues that apanning the post-1950s moment, the author weaves numerous references to a variety of Bellow works into nearly all of his chapters. It is a literary historical mapping organized by decades and also by themes in American fictions. Useful for locating Bellow among fellow writers.

• Karl, Frederick R. "Bellow's Comic 'Last Men.'" Thalia 1.2 (1978): 19-26.
  

  Describes the Bellow novel as one in which surface irony, wit and comedy and subsurface "endless tunnels of torment and pain in the Kafkaesque mode" are constantly in tension. Discusses the thesis in H, MSP, and HG.

• Karl, Frederick R. "Picaresque and the American Experience." Yale Review 57.2 (1968): 196-212.
  

  Begins with a review of James' influence on the structure of the novel, provides a historical survey of the European picaresque form, and then relates both traditions to the unique circumstances of the American tradition. Demonstrates how the tradition of the American anti-heroic picaro develops and briefly deals with the Bellow picaro within this framework.

• Kazin, Alfred. "Absurdity as a Contemporary Style." Mediterranean 1.3 (1971): 39-46. Revised version rpt. as "The Absurd as a Contemporary Style: Ellison to Pynchon" in Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Ed. Alfred Kazin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 243-81.
  
  
• Kazin, Alfred. "Bellow's Purgatory." New York Review of Books 28 Mar. 1968: 32-36.
  
  
• Kazin, Alfred. "The Earthly City of the Jews: Bellow to Singer." Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Alfred Kazin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 125-62. Rpt. Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 28-46.
  
  
• Kazin, Alfred. "The World of Saul Bellow." Contemporaries. Alfred Kazin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. 217-23.
  

  A brief introduction to the Bellow novel.

• Kennedy, Eugene. "Say It Isn't So: Another Legend Leaves Chicago." Chicago Tribune 24 May 1993: 1: 13.
  

  An article discussing the loss to Chicago of Saul Bellow. Argues that the University of Chicago should not have allowed this to happen. Also discusses what questions this raises about a city that can remember its gangsters better than its writers. Notes that future Chicago generations will have to read Bellow to find out about their city, as people now read Dickens for information about the London of his day. Concludes that in a mock trial on Judgment Day St. Peter will ask, "And you did not protest television news committing murder at 6 pm every night, but you did let Mr. Bellow go?"

• Kiernan, Robert F. "The Styles of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 91-100.
  

  Discusses Bellow's early 1950's pronounciative style of the French existentialists, and progression towards the more ample and rhetorically indulgent nineteenth-century style. Argues that as early as DM an interaction of one style with the other is evident. Sees this as the influence of existentialism and Hemingwayesque modernism-a pronounciative ipse dixit tone based on a reductive use of syntax and chiaroscuro interplay of philosophical abstractions with vernacular speech, ungrammatical repetition, rich assertions, robust declaration, parallelism, and metaphorical playfulness. Traces this mix through the major works, and concludes that within Bellow's work the nineteenth century pronounciative style always contends with the amplified style, although Bellow continued a modernist experimental style from the 1950's on. Concludes that no device of characterization has transformed his discordant metaphysical awareness more strategically than the stylistic variations that are their symbol and cipher.

• Kim, Kyung-ae. "The Bellowian Self." Journal of English Language and Literature [Korea] 44.4 (1998): 771-88.
  

  A lengthy examination of Bellow's quest for the ground of selfhood and its purposes. Treats a variety of topics such as conflicting notions of self, egocentric selves, dubious selves, historically enmeshed selves, romantic selves, original selves, primitive selves, visionary gifts, cosmic correspondances, spiritual forces, and radical transcendence. Concludes that Bellow's novels break with the fundamental dichotomy of the Western mind by seeking a redeeming vision in epiphanic moments beyond all of the seer/seen, knower/know, I/you, distinctions.

• Klein, Jeffrey. "Armies of the Planet: A Comparative Analysis of Norman Mailer's and Saul Bellow's Political Visions." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 58.1 (1975): 69-83.
  

  Believes that both Bellow and Mailer had recognized by the late 1960's that the most serious threat to America was not the Vietcong or the counter-culture and Black power movements, but the failure of the traditional WASP culture. Analyzes MSP and other novels from this perspective.

• Klein, Marcus. "A Discipline of Nobility: Saul Bellow's Fiction." Kenyon Review 24.2 (1962): 203-26. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow: A Discipline of Nobility." After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century. Marcus Klein. New York: World, 1964. 33-70; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970; Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978; Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 92-113; Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Irving Malin. Twentieth Century Views. Edglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1978. 135-60.
  

  Sees Bellow's fiction as moving, along with much other fiction of the 1950's and 1960's, from alienation to accommodation. Bellow's work, however, is more imaginative and severe. Each hero must meet with a strong sense of self, the sacrifice of self demanded by social circumstance. Discusses in detail the demanding world of the protagonists in each of the novels.

• Klug, M. A. "Saul Bellow: The Hero in the Middle." Dalhousie Review 56.3 (1976): 462-78. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 181-94.
  

  Suggests that from the beginning of his career, Bellow has consciously tried to avoid what he sees as extremes of the modern American tradition and at the same time to work those extremes as the central conflict within his own work. Locates the Bellow hero squarely between the romantic tradition of triumph and the naturalistic tradition of inevitable defeat.

• Knopp, Josephine Zadovsky. "Jewish America: Saul Bellow." The Trial of Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Writing. Josephine Zadovsky Knopp. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1975. 126-56.
  

  Argues that the fictional world of Saul Bellow has often been discussed from the point of view of its relationship to the works of Roth and Malamud, but despite some obvious similarities in their treatment of moral tensions inherent in Jewish life in America, that there are many valid comparisons to be made between the religious Hassidic mysticism of Elie Wiesel and the secular mysticism of Bellow. Discusses Leventhal's victimization, Herzog's roots in the European shtetl, Sammler's newfound God-conscious pieties, Elya's Jewishness, and the importance of Meister Eckhardt to Mr. Sammler. Concludes that Bellow seems to be suggesting that Jewish historical consciousness provides a "potent counter to doctrines of despair."

• Kondo, Kyoko. "Pursuit of One Theme: Saul Bellow's Early Novels, Dangling Man, The Victim and Seize the Day." Sophia English Studies [Japan] 3 (1978): 86-98. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1981.
  
  
• Kort, Wesley A. "Simplicity and Complexity in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Moral Fiber: Character and Belief in Recent American Fiction. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982. 74-83.
  
  
• Kraus, Joe W. "Collecting Saul Bellow: Some Questions and Answers." A. B. Bookman's Weekly 27 Jan. 1992: 233-34.
  

  A brief journalistic piece in which Kraus recounts his Bellow book collecting, his deep-felt appreciation for Bellow's lasting power, and recent publications. Notes that Bellow has produced about fifty short stories, several plays, about one hundred and forty essays and other pieces, ten book prefaces and much editing, as well as inspired over fifty books about himself. Discusses his own current projects: (1) a dictionary of characters, and (2) an author bibliography on Bellow.

• Kramer, Hilton. "Saul Bellow, Our Contemporary." Commentary June 1994: 37-41. Rpt. in The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War. Hilton Kramer. Chicago: Dee, 1999. 167-80.
  

  Describes how he and his generation eagerly received each one of Bellow's first few novels up to the publication of Herzog, a penultimate novel which he and his generation of Jewish intellectuals saw as defining their world. Then describes their perception of the courageous, sagacious, and prophetic qualities of MSP, which they saw as descriptive of the moral collapse of New York and of the emancipated Jewish middle-class fundamental to the Jewish intellectuals of his and Bellow's generation. Explains how he then drops out of the Bellow fan club with the publication of HG and registers his distrust of Bellow's fable of Delmore Schwartz's life. Describes HG as an extended exercise in self-exoneration, and complains that Bellow's subsequent books seemed bent settling old scores and trying out metaphysical roles. From this autobiographical and historical persepctive he locates his assessment of IAAU, which he describes as containing things both "Herzogian" at their best and bogged down in the "moronic inferno" at their worst. Notes that from the Jefferson lectures through all of these pieces there is something unacknowledged–something offstage that sparks his indignation without ever being openly confronted or identified, something about the true sources of his anger. Writes of Bellow's early welcome by the Partisan Review and his later withering condescension toward them. Wonders about Bellow's scorn for the fallacies of Marxism and his suspicious silence on the subject at the time. Criticizes him for not being able to write the moral history of the Russian immigrants of his day, though recently it seems Bellow cannot stop talking about it in his 1990-1991 interviews–only one of the losses we are reminded of in IAAU. Criticizes also Bellow's fixation on degraded popular culture, the media's culpability, and its distractions, because he seems to trivialize this malevolent phenomenon by reducing it to merely a major distraction for writers and intellectuals who are thereby deprived of an audience. Describes Bellow as ultimately inhabiting an invisible political place between the disabuses of a liberalism he clings to and the neo-conservatism he both embraces and spurns–a space of intellectual refuge for a dwindling remnant of homeless liberals who identify their survival with a refusal of affiliation. Provides a detailed account of the attacks on Bellow as a racist and university intellectual, and criticizes Bellow's rather feeble responses. He accuses Bellow of remaining our contemporary in his copping-out on such explosive topics as multiculturalism and political correctness.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Memoir and History: Saul Bellow's Old Men Remembering in 'Mosby's Memoirs,' 'The Old System,' and The Bellarosa Connection." Saul Bellow Journal 12.2 (1994): 44-58.
  

  Suggests that Bellow's exploration of the significance of memory through short fictions is revealed in three stories of old men remembering the past: Willis Mosby (MM), Samuel Braun (TOS), and the unnammed narrator in BC. Each protagonist considers a person or people in his past, either in obliviousness to memory's relevance, or in appreciation of its significance. Unlike Mosby, who remains blind and deaf to the meaning of human suffering, the narrator or BC redeems himself through his self-lacerating memoir. The reverential Jewish tone and context which close the narrative address the importance of relating to one's particular historic/cultural memory, and place memory in the sphere of religious obligation.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Saul Bellow's Remembrance of Jewish Times Past: Herzog and 'The Old System.'" Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 101-17.
  

  Claims that Bellow's fiction, emanating as it so richly does from his Jewishness, engages the universal. His thought, language, history, themes, characters, constructs, style, imagery, allusions, and tone all reflect the influence of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures. Traces these influences in considerable detail through both "The Old System," and H—particularly with reference to their common Montreal connections. Concludes that like Malamud, Singer, Ozick, and other Jewish American authors who write in the mode of redemptive spiritual return, Bellow consistently affirms humankind's spiritual capacity and ethical potential, and nowhere more forcefully than in "The Old System" which he identifies as a favorite among his own works.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Scars of Outrage: The Holocaust in The Victim and Mr. Saramler's Planet." Witness through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature. S. Lillian Kremer. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989. 36-62.
  

  Claims that Bellow was at the forefront of American readiness to address antisemitism in literature. Demonstrates that throughout the canon he presents the theme of antisemitism dramatically, allusively, and symbolically. Notes that though it is a subdued component, it is ever present in the fiction. Traces the elements chronologically through the novels. Concludes that fiction's retreat to aesthetics, its tendency to be its own source, is something Bellow has attacked.

• Kretzer, Birgit Erika, ed. Idealitat und Realitat der Frauenfiguren ira modernen amerikanischen Roman: Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, John Hawkes: literarische Bezuge zewischen Wirklichkeits- und Vorstellengsstrukturerz. Europaische Hochschulschriften. Reihe XIV, Angelsachsische Sprache und Literatur, Bd. 197/European University Studies. Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 197. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 1989. [In German.]
  
  
• Kreutzer, Eberhard. "'World City': Cosmopolis und Schmelztiegel." New York in der zeitgenössischen Amerikanischen erzählliteratur [New York in Contemporary American Fiction}. Anglistische Forschungen 182. Heidelberg: Winter, 1985. 200-22. Passim.
  
  
• Krupnick, Mark. "He Never Learned to Swim." New Review 2.22 (1976): 33-39.
  

  Discusses the literary career of Philip Rahv and the publication Modern Occasions. Also contains an entertaining and accurate account of Bellow's literary criticism which appeared in the journal. Places Bellow's jeremiad on modern media intellectuals in a historical and cultural framework.

• Kulshrestha, Chirantan. "The Bellow Gyroscope: Letters to Richard G. Stern." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 36-43.
  

  Suggests that Bellow's letters to Richard Stern provide a penetrating glimpse of his creative anxieties, his creative problem-solving in writing, and his growing belief in the affirmative power of art. In addition, they record the progress of a warm, self-revealing relationship on Bellow's part. These letters span the crucial period following the publication of SD and "bristle with aspirations, uncertainties, and contemplated strategies." Here Bellow tests many of his embryonic theories of the role of the artist, using Stern as sounding board. The letters relating to the period surrounding the writing of HRK show his deepening awareness as an artist. They are also frank and full of unselfconscious personal information. In addition, they contain many of Bellow's responses to Stern's own novels.

• Kulshrestha, Chirantan. "The Making of Saul Bellow's Fiction: Notes from the Underground." American Studies International 19.2 (1981): 48-56.
  

  A brief article reporting Kulshrestha's findings in the Bellow files at the Department of Special Collections at the University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library.

• Kumar, Shiv. "Chapter One: Saul Bellow and the Hebraic Prophetic Tradition." Tablet Breakers in the American Wilderness.
  

  Defines the prophetic temper as marked by an uncompromising and fearless struggle against tyranny, injustice, and evil in human society, and as that temper which asserted moral force against the vagaries of popular culture, thereby humanizing mankind. Places Saul Bellow in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets insofar as he upholds the primacy of mortality in all his writings. Within the simulacrum of literary modernism, his writings are a vital counterforce. Argues that he lays bare the barren aestheticism of modernism and its preoccupations with style, its dehumanizing tendencies, centerless subjectivity, and its refusal of moral vision. An elaborate close reading of Bellow's in moral vision as it extends also out of shtetl faith, romantic affirmation, and a refusal of rationalism.

• Kumar, P. Shiv. "From Kavanah to Mitzvah: A Perspective on Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Indian Journal of American Studies 10.2 (1980): 30-39.
  

  Argues that Herzog lives by a code he calls his "law of the heart," whereas Mr. Sammler lives in search of the higher terms of his contracts. H is the last of a line of novels searching for the basic law, while MSP is the beginning of a new kind of search for "higher activity."

• Kumar, P. Shiv. "Saul Bellow and the Hebraic Prophetic Tradition." Journal of English Studies [India] 11.2 (1980): 756-65. Rpt. as "The Hero and the Prophet: A Study of Bellow's Fiction." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 137-49.
  

  Rather loosely defines the Hebraic prophetic tradition in terms of prophecy, emphasis on moral perfectability of man, rejection of ritual, primacy of morality over cultic practices of popular religion, indifference toward theological speculation, the achievement of oneness and of belonging to the humanity of his existence, and the coming Messianic age. Proceeds to discuss Bellow's views on the relation of art and artist in society to this Hebraic sense of life. Discusses also Bellow's optimism, his belief in the universe as planned and ordered, and his belief in humankind as indicative of the influence of the Hebraic prophetic tradition.

• Kyria, Pierre. "Le Monde Americain." Revue de Paris Mar. 1967: 120-25.
  
  

• James, E. Anthony. "The Hero and the Anti-Hero in Fiction." Four Quarters 23 (Autumn 1973): 3-23.
  
  
• Johnson, Gregory. "Bellow's Bellows." Saul Bellow Journal 6.2 (1987): 3-18.
  

  Cites Tanner, Clayton, and Cohen on the subject of solipsism and monologue in the Bellow novel, and claims that while there is a certain truth to their observations, they have overlooked a "form of 'true dialogue' that helps constitute social intercourse. The trouble with their reading stems from their conception of dialogue . . . merely in linguistic terms . . . . They disregard the wealth of nonverbal dialogue which often relates Bellow's characters one to another" (34). The discussion focuses on communication codes such as physiognomy, space, gesture, and paralanguage with screams, cries, moans, groans, coughs, and bellows.

• Johnson, Greg. "Novellas for the Nineties." Georgia Review 45.2 (1991): 363-71.
  

  Reviews a variety of novellas by American fiction writers, including AT and BC. Describes AT as a departure for Bellow because of its female protagonist, Clara Velde, whose vivid personality and emotional force dominate the novel. Describes the plot and characters in detail. Considers BC a pithy rambling novella which functions as a powerful mediation on the Holocaust, the history of the Jews, and the changing nature of the individual's relationship to culture. Calls its vernacular pungent, colorful and deeply humane. Argues that while the premises of BC strain credibility, being both too flimsy and too outlandish to sustain its rather ponderous themes, it is afterall about American cultural topography. Concludes that both novellas seem the ideal vehicles for Bellow's protean if sometimes overzealous talent.

• Johnson, Gregory Allen. "Spatial Dialogue in Bellow's Fiction." Mosaic 16.3 (1983): 117-25.
  

  Johnson asserts that verbal exchange is not the only means of communication in the Bellow novel, and that engagement is regulated by the laws of social space. These laws hold that a writer's characters are related metonymically—that is, by contiguity. The article explores this principle of communication through several key scenes and novels. Bellow's fiction is distinct in the emphasis he places on spatial dialogue. Related to his general concern with man as a sign-making being is his awareness that non-verbal exchange is frequently a simpler, sounder, and truer form of dialogue than speech.

• Josipovici, Gabriel. "Freedom and Wit: The Jewish Writer and Modern Art." European Judaism 3.1 (1968): 41-50.
  

  Pursues the relationship between Jewishness, modernism, romanticism, and Christianity. Erudite and philosophical in orientation. Minimal analysis of individual novels.

• Josipovici, Gabriel. "Saul Bellow." The Lessons of Modernism and Other Essays. Gabriel Josipovici. Totowa, N J: Rowman, 1977. 64-84. Previously published as the introduction to Portable Saul Bellow. New York: Viking, 1974. vii-xxiv.
  

  Provides an overview of all of the novels from the point of view of tone and voice. Argues that each novel is a development of the very first novel, DM, and that each hero dangles in a slightly different way.

• James, E. Anthony. "The Hero and the Anti-Hero in Fiction." Four Quarters 23 (Autumn 1973): 3-23.
  
  
• Johnson, Gregory. "Bellow's Bellows." Saul Bellow Journal 6.2 (1987): 3-18.
  

  Cites Tanner, Clayton, and Cohen on the subject of solipsism and monologue in the Bellow novel, and claims that while there is a certain truth to their observations, they have overlooked a "form of 'true dialogue' that helps constitute social intercourse. The trouble with their reading stems from their conception of dialogue . . . merely in linguistic terms . . . . They disregard the wealth of nonverbal dialogue which often relates Bellow's characters one to another" (34). The discussion focuses on communication codes such as physiognomy, space, gesture, and paralanguage with screams, cries, moans, groans, coughs, and bellows.

• Johnson, Greg. "Novellas for the Nineties." Georgia Review 45.2 (1991): 363-71.
  

  Reviews a variety of novellas by American fiction writers, including AT and BC. Describes AT as a departure for Bellow because of its female protagonist, Clara Velde, whose vivid personality and emotional force dominate the novel. Describes the plot and characters in detail. Considers BC a pithy rambling novella which functions as a powerful mediation on the Holocaust, the history of the Jews, and the changing nature of the individual's relationship to culture. Calls its vernacular pungent, colorful and deeply humane. Argues that while the premises of BC strain credibility, being both too flimsy and too outlandish to sustain its rather ponderous themes, it is afterall about American cultural topography. Concludes that both novellas seem the ideal vehicles for Bellow's protean if sometimes overzealous talent.

• Johnson, Gregory Allen. "Spatial Dialogue in Bellow's Fiction." Mosaic 16.3 (1983): 117-25.
  

  Johnson asserts that verbal exchange is not the only means of communication in the Bellow novel, and that engagement is regulated by the laws of social space. These laws hold that a writer's characters are related metonymically—that is, by contiguity. The article explores this principle of communication through several key scenes and novels. Bellow's fiction is distinct in the emphasis he places on spatial dialogue. Related to his general concern with man as a sign-making being is his awareness that non-verbal exchange is frequently a simpler, sounder, and truer form of dialogue than speech.

• Josipovici, Gabriel. "Freedom and Wit: The Jewish Writer and Modern Art." European Judaism 3.1 (1968): 41-50.
  

  Pursues the relationship between Jewishness, modernism, romanticism, and Christianity. Erudite and philosophical in orientation. Minimal analysis of individual novels.

• Josipovici, Gabriel. "Saul Bellow." The Lessons of Modernism and Other Essays. Gabriel Josipovici. Totowa, N J: Rowman, 1977. 64-84. Previously published as the introduction to Portable Saul Bellow. New York: Viking, 1974. vii-xxiv.
  

  Provides an overview of all of the novels from the point of view of tone and voice. Argues that each novel is a development of the very first novel, DM, and that each hero dangles in a slightly different way.

• Judie Newman, and Jonathan Wilson's On Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side.
  
  

• Maddocks, Melvin. "Life among the Bibliophiles." Christian Science Monitor 11 May 1988: 19.
  

  Discusses the historically unprecedented event of Bellow, during his own lifetime, auctioning off at Sotheby's his working papers of the MSP manuscript. Discusses the sale of other famous writers' manuscripts. Concludes by reporting that Bellow is considering using these proceeds to endow a university chair for a writer.

• Malin, Irving. "The Jewishness of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and P. Shiv Kumar. 1983. 47–55.
  

  Argues that Bellow is the most important contemporary Jewish–American novelist. His work contains the new and the old, the American and the Jewish. He seems less interested in religion, laws, and ritual, than he does with general vision. He is ambivalent about his heritage—its humor, its sense of absurdity, and helplessness—but he never confronts it except by indirection, or through masquerade. Details the various evidences of Jewish sensibility in the various novels as far as HRK, in which he seems to suggest through this gentile protagonist, that all men are Jews.

• Malin, Irving. Jews and Americans. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1965. 47–51, 73–75, 95–99, 116–19, 132–34, 147–51, 167–68, passim.
  

  Treats the question of Jewish writers in America under such headings as the following: Exile; Fathers and Sons; Time; Head and Heart; Transcendence; and Irony, Fantasy and Parable. In the cource of this literary historical mapping, numerous Bellow fictions and characters are placed in thematic context.

• Malin, Irving. "Saul Bellow." London Magazine Jan. 1965: 43–54.
  

  Provides a general introduction for the British reader of Be!low's first six novels using the headings: 1) Madness versus Sanity and 2) Prophecy versus Preaching.

• Malin, Irving. "Seven Images." Said Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 142–76.
  

  Argues that Bellow most effectively conveys his metaphysics through patterns of images which recur throughout the novels. Traces these image patterns carefully through all the novels to date and relates them to the ideas they are meant to underscore. The seven images are documented and related to theme, and shown to be interlocking and reinforcing each other to produce the effect of unity and intensified meaning in the novels.

• Mandra, Mihail. "Saul Bellow's Novel in the Context of European Thought: A Greek World." Synthesis 7 (1980): 191–205.
  

  Argues that Bellow succeeds in working out a special kind of novel called "anthropologie." Bellow strikes a paradoxical note in the whole history of American fiction because of this European grounding. His novels belong to the state subsequent to the great classics, coming as they do after the 1940's. The focus is on ideas. "He is closer to the classical traditions of the American and European novel because he rejects the socio-philosophical theories and the American psychosis dominated by cycnical holocaust theories. He works in the same ardently humanistic plane, vigorously combining Benjamin Franklin's moral balance with Hemingway's virile sense of life." An erudite study of Be!low's relation to Western intellectual and literary history.

• Manske, Eva. "Das Menschenbild im Prosaschaffen Saul Bellows Anspruch und Wirklichkeit." Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik [East Berlin] 21 (1973): 270–88, 360–83. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1973.
  
  
• Marcus, Steven. "Reading the Illegible: Some Modern Representations of Urban Experience." Visions of the Modern City.' Essays in History, Art and Literature. Eds. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock. Proceedings of the Heyman Center for the Humanities. New York: Columbia U Heyman Center for the Humanities, 1983. 228–43. Rpt. in Southern Review [Baton Rouge] 22.3 (1986): 443–64.
  
  
• Markus, Manfred. "Bellow's Vermachtnis: Zur Rezeption eines Nobelpreistragers in tier Bundesrepublik Deutschland." Zeitschri ft fur Kulturaustausch 28 (1978): 101–09.
  
  
• Marovitz, Sanford E. "The Panorama of America in American–Jewish Fiction." Zeitschroft fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 36.1 ( 1988): 47–61.
  

  Describes the mainstream development of American–Jewish literature as influenced primarily by humanistic idealism, Howellsian realism, and naturalism, by contrast with the last 25 years during which has seen authors distancing themselves from their backgrounds as Jews. Sees these writers and their characters as either turning inward in a comic and pathetic quest for self, or expanding the parameters of narrative by attempting a variety of innovative approaches in their fiction in line with contemporary European critical theory. Begins tracing American–Jewish realism from Emma Lazarus down to Roth, Bellow, Paley, and others influenced by postmodernist thought. A major overview.

• Marudanayagam, P. "An Intellectual with a Strain of Liberal Humanism." Swarajya [India] 27 Nov. 1976: 12–13, 18.
  

  Reviews Bellow's publications, Jewish background, intellectual work on behalf of individuality, the profile of the typical Bellow hero, and his search for a good enough fate. Reviews each of the novels, comments on his Neo-Baroque style, and his place in contemporary literature.

• Materassi, Mario. "An Homage to Saul Bellow." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 14–18.
  

  Discusses the connections between Malcolm Cowley's The Exile's Return and Saul Bellow's DM. Notes that both books talk about exile, and dangling. In their silent eloquent communications, their two books talk to one another about discovery and fulfillment. Provides an anecdotal tribute to his simultaneous discovery of both Bellow and America, and his first experience of hearing Bellow speak.

• Mathy, Francis. "Zetsubo no kanata ni." Sophia [Tokyo] 19 (1970): 356–77. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1971.
  
  
• Maw, Joe. "Method in his Madness: Bellow Develops the Theme of Insanity." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 1–12.
  

  Discusses the references to madness made by numerous Bellow protagonists. Focuses on the chronological progression of the commentary, and on Bellow's answers to the questions surrounding why contemporary craziness exists and what can be done about it.

• Maddocks, Melvin. "Life among the Bibliophiles." Christian Science Monitor 11 May 1988: 19.
  

  Discusses the historically unprecedented event of Bellow, during his own lifetime, auctioning off at Sotheby's his working papers of the MSP manuscript. Discusses the sale of other famous writers' manuscripts. Concludes by reporting that Bellow is considering using these proceeds to endow a university chair for a writer.

• Malin, Irving. "The Jewishness of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and P. Shiv Kumar. 1983. 47–55.
  

  Argues that Bellow is the most important contemporary Jewish–American novelist. His work contains the new and the old, the American and the Jewish. He seems less interested in religion, laws, and ritual, than he does with general vision. He is ambivalent about his heritage—its humor, its sense of absurdity, and helplessness—but he never confronts it except by indirection, or through masquerade. Details the various evidences of Jewish sensibility in the various novels as far as HRK, in which he seems to suggest through this gentile protagonist, that all men are Jews.

• Malin, Irving. Jews and Americans. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1965. 47–51, 73–75, 95–99, 116–19, 132–34, 147–51, 167–68, passim.
  

  Treats the question of Jewish writers in America under such headings as the following: Exile; Fathers and Sons; Time; Head and Heart; Transcendence; and Irony, Fantasy and Parable. In the cource of this literary historical mapping, numerous Bellow fictions and characters are placed in thematic context.

• Malin, Irving. "Saul Bellow." London Magazine Jan. 1965: 43–54.
  

  Provides a general introduction for the British reader of Be!low's first six novels using the headings: 1) Madness versus Sanity and 2) Prophecy versus Preaching.

• Malin, Irving. "Seven Images." Said Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 142–76.
  

  Argues that Bellow most effectively conveys his metaphysics through patterns of images which recur throughout the novels. Traces these image patterns carefully through all the novels to date and relates them to the ideas they are meant to underscore. The seven images are documented and related to theme, and shown to be interlocking and reinforcing each other to produce the effect of unity and intensified meaning in the novels.

• Mandra, Mihail. "Saul Bellow's Novel in the Context of European Thought: A Greek World." Synthesis 7 (1980): 191–205.
  

  Argues that Bellow succeeds in working out a special kind of novel called "anthropologie." Bellow strikes a paradoxical note in the whole history of American fiction because of this European grounding. His novels belong to the state subsequent to the great classics, coming as they do after the 1940's. The focus is on ideas. "He is closer to the classical traditions of the American and European novel because he rejects the socio-philosophical theories and the American psychosis dominated by cycnical holocaust theories. He works in the same ardently humanistic plane, vigorously combining Benjamin Franklin's moral balance with Hemingway's virile sense of life." An erudite study of Be!low's relation to Western intellectual and literary history.

• Manske, Eva. "Das Menschenbild im Prosaschaffen Saul Bellows Anspruch und Wirklichkeit." Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik [East Berlin] 21 (1973): 270–88, 360–83. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1973.
  
  
• Marcus, Steven. "Reading the Illegible: Some Modern Representations of Urban Experience." Visions of the Modern City.' Essays in History, Art and Literature. Eds. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock. Proceedings of the Heyman Center for the Humanities. New York: Columbia U Heyman Center for the Humanities, 1983. 228–43. Rpt. in Southern Review [Baton Rouge] 22.3 (1986): 443–64.
  
  
• Markus, Manfred. "Bellow's Vermachtnis: Zur Rezeption eines Nobelpreistragers in tier Bundesrepublik Deutschland." Zeitschri ft fur Kulturaustausch 28 (1978): 101–09.
  
  
• Marovitz, Sanford E. "The Panorama of America in American–Jewish Fiction." Zeitschroft fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 36.1 ( 1988): 47–61.
  

  Describes the mainstream development of American–Jewish literature as influenced primarily by humanistic idealism, Howellsian realism, and naturalism, by contrast with the last 25 years during which has seen authors distancing themselves from their backgrounds as Jews. Sees these writers and their characters as either turning inward in a comic and pathetic quest for self, or expanding the parameters of narrative by attempting a variety of innovative approaches in their fiction in line with contemporary European critical theory. Begins tracing American–Jewish realism from Emma Lazarus down to Roth, Bellow, Paley, and others influenced by postmodernist thought. A major overview.

• Marudanayagam, P. "An Intellectual with a Strain of Liberal Humanism." Swarajya [India] 27 Nov. 1976: 12–13, 18.
  

  Reviews Bellow's publications, Jewish background, intellectual work on behalf of individuality, the profile of the typical Bellow hero, and his search for a good enough fate. Reviews each of the novels, comments on his Neo-Baroque style, and his place in contemporary literature.

• Materassi, Mario. "An Homage to Saul Bellow." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 14–18.
  

  Discusses the connections between Malcolm Cowley's The Exile's Return and Saul Bellow's DM. Notes that both books talk about exile, and dangling. In their silent eloquent communications, their two books talk to one another about discovery and fulfillment. Provides an anecdotal tribute to his simultaneous discovery of both Bellow and America, and his first experience of hearing Bellow speak.

• Mathy, Francis. "Zetsubo no kanata ni." Sophia [Tokyo] 19 (1970): 356–77. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1971.
  
  
• Maw, Joe. "Method in his Madness: Bellow Develops the Theme of Insanity." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 1–12.
  

  Discusses the references to madness made by numerous Bellow protagonists. Focuses on the chronological progression of the commentary, and on Bellow's answers to the questions surrounding why contemporary craziness exists and what can be done about it.

• May, Keith M. Out of the Maelstrom: Psychology and the Novel in the Twentieth Century. London: Paul Elek, 1977. 94–97.
  

  Provides a brief treatment of Bellow's existentialism, the issue of freedom, and the treatment of the phenomenal world in Bellow novels.

• Maynard, Senko K. "Contrastive Rhetoric: A Case of Nominalization in Japanese and English Discourse." Language Sciences 18:3–4 (1996): 933–46.
  

  A linguistic study using comparing "nominalization" in novelistic discourse in English and Japanese which uses Bellow as an example.

• Meindl, Dieter. Der zeitgenossische amerikanische Roman. Ed. Gerhard Hoffmann. 3 vols. Miinchen: Fink, 1988. 2: 53–101. [In German.]
  
  
• McConnell, Frank D. "Saul Bellow and the Terms of our Contract." Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth, and Pynchon. Frank McConnell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977. 1–57. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 101–14.
  

  Attempts to place Bellow historically within a confusing postwar world where both realism and experimentalism have determined literary reputations. Bellow has benefited from the one fashion and suffered because of the other. Also discusses the central issues surrounding Jewish novelists and novels with reference to Bellow's historical position. Finally locates Bellow as an ideological novelist. A major article.

• McCormick, John. "Historical Event in the Prose Fiction of Henry de Montherlant and Saul Bellow." Eigo Seinen 125.3 (1979): 118–21.
  

  Sees Bellow and de Montherlant as "ordering history in ways that are purely individual, yet in ways that reflect an awareness of history that must be distinguished from apprehensions of the past, of the great writers of the nineteenth-century, and many writers of the twentieth-century who remain close to the nineteenth-century tradition."

• McCoy, Kathleen. "Dangling Man and Herzog. First Novel as Ur-Text." Saul Bellow Journal 13.2 (1995): 66–80.
  

  Argues that in DM Bellow establishes all the themes that he will later develop in H: destiny versus freedom, depression and joy, existential alienation and transcendence, the void and God, innate foolishness and innate cleverness, sensibility and intellectual rationality, the abstract and the banal, personal history and the history of ideas, past and present, the city and domesticity, self and community, moral values and worldly values, Jewishness and gentile culture, and so on. All of these find far fuller expression in Bellow's sixth major work, H, published in 1964. DM seems to have served as the prototype or ur-text from which the richer, more comic characterization, more intricate structure, and deeper affirmation of H were to spring twenty years later. The Joseph with the coat of many colors and the G.I. uniform has become Moses the lawgiver with the tailored, striped sport coat. Suggests, however, that Herzog emerges a new Jewish figure for the post-Holocaust age—no more a role model than his predecessor, but wiser, more empathic, more comic, and more capable of loving.

• McDowell, Edwin. "About Books and Authors." New York Times Book Reviews 21 Feb. 1982: 38.
  
  
• McDowell, Edwin. "Grass vs Bellow Over U.S. at PEN." New York Times 15 Jan. 1986: C15.
  

  Describes the conversations between Günter Grass and Saul Bellow at the 1986 PEN Congress, regarding Bellow's appraisals of the American dream. Reports on comments by various writers, especially exiled ones, on a variety of topics. Describes in detail Bellow's defense of his remarks about freedom, prosperity, and well-being in America.

• McGinty, Carolyn. "In These Words are Life: Literature and Faith." Historicism and Faith: Proceedings of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. Ed. Paul Williams. Scranton, PA: Northeast Books, 1980. 63–73.
  

  Argues, in the context of an essay focusing on the relationship between historicism and faith, that Bellow reminds us literature can no longer compete with miraculous wonders of technology. Points out that Bellow has reminded us to attempt to recover a sense of significant space, a region through which events must make their approach and be received on decent terms. Concludes that Bellow finds accounts of human existence given by modern intelligence unsatisfactory, and opts instead for the primacy of imagination and a Heracliten. Listening to things.

• McGrath, Charles. "The Gray American Novel." New York Times Magazine 22 Oct. 2000: 29–30.
  

  Describes a variety of aged protagonists by aged authors in American literature, with particular reference to Chick, in Bellow?s R. Rabbit Angstrom in Updike?s Rabbit Remembered, and Nathan Zuckerman in Roth?s The Human Stain. Comments that what is touching about these characters is that they are survivors in a new kind of American novelCone by and for elderly survivors of life whose lives are now much longer than previous generations of writers. Argues that this is a novel that is narrower, more anxious, not nearly as noble and romantic as the traditional American coming-of-age novel. Furthermore, it is particularly honest about the pleasures and discontents of maturity. Finds these characters with extended lives unsure and surprised at themselves. Concludes that these books, like R, smell of the wood smoke of mortality and impending darkness.

• McSweeney, Kerry. "Saul Bellow and the Life to Come." Critical Quarterly 18.1 (1976): 67–72.
  

  Sees in Bellow's novels the same kind of belief in the immortality of souls and the spirits of the dead seen in Yeats' "A Vision" and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Provides a brief treatment of the theme.

• Melani, Sandro. "Bellow in corso." [Bellow in Progress]." Ponte [Florence] 33 (1977): 979–82.
  
  
• Mendelson, M. O. "Social Criticism in the Works of Bellow, Updike, and Cheever." Soviet Criticism of American Literature in the Sixties: An Anthology. Ed. and trans. Carl R. Proffer. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1972. 63–70. Part of a longer article published in Problems of Twentieth-Century American Literature. Moscow, 1970.
  
  
• Mergen, Bernard. "Looking for Mr. Bellow." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 4–6.
  

  A memoir of his respect for Bellow as well as a general introduction to the five essays that comprise the ASI 35.1(February 1997). Summarizes each of the essays in turn. Recalls a night on which he met Saul Bellow at a dinner held in the home of Charleton Laird, during which Bellow told stories about writing AAM in a cheap hotel room in Chicago, played his recorder for the guests, and confessed that he got many of his best ideas from Scientific American.

• Mesher, David R. "Saul Bellow: Confessions of a Jewish Odium Eater." Delta 19 (Oct. 1984): 67–91.
  

  Ranges across a variety of topics including whether or not there is such a thing as Jewish–American literature, Bellow's treatment of Blacks, stereotypes of various kinds, Bellow's revision of romanticism, women characters, his studied indifference to Jewish issues, and his deliberate attempts to distance himself from ethnic stereotyping.

• Michaels, Leonard. "Bellow's Gift." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 57–62.
  

  Gives a brief tribute to the Yiddishness, the spokenness, and the conversational resonances in Bellow's books. Contains bibliographic and critical commentary. Pays particular attention to Bellow's descriptive powers. Concludes that Bellow's Yiddish-apocalyptic wit is giddy-making, but that his ability to portray lively Yiddish voices is a fantastic gift. Provides an anecdotal account of his first encounter with IAAU. Sees Bellow as belonging to a tradition as old as Aristophone: graceful, quick, funny, and philosophical. Compares him to Charlie Parker, or the modern poets, in his allusiveness. Concludes by praising Bellow's ability to "paint pictures and evoke living voices."

• Miller, Karl. "Duality in America." Doubles: Studies in Literary History. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. 349–81.
  

  Details the ethos of ostracism and escape, hardship and danger, and new life that have characterized the New World. Inside this paradigm concerning American literature Bellow is treated as one more writer reproducing dualistic worlds and characters. Treates HG, TV, DD, and DM in some detail.

• Morganroth-Gullette, Margaret. "Saul Bellow: Inward and Upward, Past Distraction." Saul Bellow Journal 9.1 (1990): 52–78.
  

  Argues that Bellow started out writing two "downer" novels about adult life, but subsequently went on to illustrate how much he did not like the aging process past the kingdom of boyhood. Shows the curious interruptedness of Bellow's "progress" novels and the amazing accomplishment of his midlife bildungsroman. Concentrates on explicating AAM (1953) which he sees as the precursor to the fast-moving, risky and venturesome HG (1975). Traces each of the novels between these two under the headings: Crises of Aging, That Elementary Confidence, Victim Literature, The Three-Volume Cure, Phenomenal Woman, Phenomenal Man, The Comic Surprise, Late Starters, Slow Learners, Happy Beginners. Concludes that like our other Bildungsromanciers, Bellow has found a way to rescue the state of happy anticipation from its literary connections with youth-on-the-threshold-of-life and restore it to the middle years. Sees the midlife progress narrative as a deeply reverential form which makes a good wish for its readers: that people of all ages might live so.

• Moro, Kochi. "Monolog and Dialog: The Distance Between J. Joyce and S. Bellow." Josai Jinbun Kenkyu. Studies in the Humanities. Sakado, lruma-Gun, Saitama, Japan: Josai University Keizai-Gaku-Kai, 1973. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1973.
  
  
• Morrow, Patrick. "Threat and Accommodation: The Novels of Saul Bellow." Midwest Quarterly 8.4 (1967): 389–411.
  

  Places Bellow within a context of both pessimistic writers and optimistic writers, and identifies him as breaking the Hemingway death code, the cult of the neurotic, and the black humor of the ironists. Depicts Bellow heroes as finding accommodation more valuable than rebellion.

• Mudrick, Marvin. "Malamud, Bellow, and Roth." On Culture and Literature. Marvin Mudrick. New York: Horizon, 1970. 200–33.
  

  Considers Bellow and Malamud Jewish provincials who are unable to meet the standards Faulkner has set, and who create the fictional American Jew when the subject of the literary Jew in American literature was already slipping out of sight. Primarily concerned with the Jewishness of the novels.

• Mukerji, Nirmal. "The Bellow Hero." Indian Journal of English Studies 9 (1968): 74–86.
  
  
• Mukerji, Nirmal. "Bellow's Measure of Man." Indian Studies in American Fiction. Dharwar, India: Karnatak University; Delhi: Macmillan India, 1974. 286–95.
  
  

• Labarthe, Elyette. "L'Apocalypse selon Saul Bellow." Le Facteur religieux en Amerique du nord. Ed. Jean Beranger. Bordeaux: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, Univ. de Bordeaux III, 1981. No. 2, Apocalypse et autres travaux: 121-42.
  
  
• Lasalle, Peter. "The Saul Bellow Speeding Ticket." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 187– 90.
  

  An anecdotal account of driving to Chicago in 1971 with the intent of taking classes from Bellow whose novels he so admired. Describes his subsequent visits to Bellow's administrative office where Bellow was currently chairing the Committee for Social Thought, Bellow's manner, his magnificent suits, ties, and topcoats, and their ongoing conversations. Concludes that Bellow was as full and complete a personality as any of his characters, and indeed a "great guy" willing to take the time to mentor a would-be writer.

• Lee, Soo-Hyun. "Bellow-Malamud-Roth: Jewish Consciousness of the Self and Humanism." Journal of English Language and Literature [Korea] 36.3 (1990): 515-35.
  
  
• Lehan, Richard. "Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The Demonic Quest." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1 (1959): 181-202.
  

  After a somewhat generalized discussion of the mutual influence of the French and American modern novel, the discussion turns to the critical problem of the influence of French existentialism on Bellow's early novels.

• Lehan, Richard. "Into the Ruins: Saul Bellow and Walker Percy." A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel. Richard Lehan. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1973. 107-45.
  

  Concentrates on the dialectic between the romantic impulse and the modern apocalypse. Discusses the plight of the Bellow protagonist in terms of his French and European counterparts. Locates Bellow squarely within the traditions of French literary existentialism. A major essay.

• Lemaster, J. R. "Saul Bellow: On Looking for a Way through the Cracks." American Bypaths: Essays in Honor of E. Hudson Long. Eds. Robert G. Collmer and Jack W. Herring. Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund of Baylor UP, 1980. 109-44.
  

  Suggests that Nathan A. Scott is right in seeing Bellow as a radically religious novelist concerned about the importance of covenants made with a God who has long since died. Examines the endings of the novels to see how Bellow works out the death and contract questions. Sees evidence of Zen and Sanskrit ideas, as well as notions from Plotinus and Philo. Concludes that Bellow's novels are interesting because of their theoretical, religious and theological concerns, not just for their social realism.

• Leonard, John. "Novelist Deals with Jews in America." New York Times 22 Oct. 1976: A1, A10.
  

  Describes Bellow's fiction as an account of the Jewish romance with America, and provides a thumbnail sketch of each of his works as he applauds Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• Levenson, J. C. "Bellow's Dangling Men." Critique 3.3 (1960): 3–14. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 39–50.
  

  Discusses the phenomenon of the sociologically marginal or "dangling man" in American literature from James Fenimore Cooper forward. Sees these earlier prototypes as invigorating Bellow's characters with their energy and exuberance, plus their determination to wrest from the American experience their freedom. Traces also the Russian influences on the shapes of these Bellow heroes, as well as the Jewish influences. Deals with each of the novels up to HRK.

• Lombardo, Agostino. "La narrativa di Saul Bellow." [Saul Bellow's Fiction]. Studi Americani 11 (1965): 309–44.
  

  Argues that the Bellow novel is a means to face life and the crowds. Writing is having faith in both art and man. Bellow portrays the modern city and the stress city life brings to men. Describes Joseph's attempt in DM to become free. Compares Bellow with other contemporary authors, including Singer. Shows how every character portrait adds to the setting and discusses Bellow's Jewish element, the search for daily, popular language. Discusses how in the Bellow novel history initiates man to life. Sees the main characters as instruments to represent society.

• Lombardo, Agostino. Realismo e Simbolismo: Saggi di letteratura americana contemporanea. Biblioteca di Studi Americani 3. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1957.
  
  
• Ludwig, Jack Barry. Recent American Novelists. University of Michigan Pamphlets on American Writers 22. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1962. 7–18.
  

  Discusses Bellow and other contemporary American writers as evidence that there has been a shift of tone and focus in American fiction. Calls Bellow and DM the sign of this shift. Provides mostly general commentary on Bellow's early works.

• Lutwack, Leonard. "Bellow's Odysseys." Heroic Fiction: The Epic Tradition and American Novels of the Twentieth Century. Leonard Lutwack. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. 88–121.
  

  Discusses the journey metaphor and the use of the myth of Odysseus in the Bellow novel. Provides a detailed exegesis of Herzog as Odyssean wanderer. Comments at length on the mock epic elements in the novels and other attributes of heroic literature. Concludes with an analysis of MSP.

• Lycette, Ronald L. "Saul Bellow and the American Naturalists." Discourse 13.4 (1970): 435–49.
  

  Argues that because Bellow is a social novelist: "He occupies a place in an American tradition of naturalism that extends, by some arguments, as far back as Melville." Sees Bellow as representing "an evolution beyond naturalism because his characters refuse to accept defeat." Compares Bellow with naturalists who precede him, and who are contemporaneous with him. Emphasizes Bellow's stress on the melting pot, the deterministic necessities of it, and on his appraisal of what it means to be less than human. Concludes with the observation that the element of optimism makes Bellow different from other naturalists.

• Lyons, Bonnie. "Bellowmalamudroth and the American Jewish Genre—Alive and Well." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 5.2 (1979): 8–10. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  

  Examines whether or not there was ever a recognizable school of Jewish–American fiction, and whether such a genre can be seen coming to an end. Concludes that American–Jewish fiction is surviving largely because of the postwar writers, including Bellow.

• Labarthe, Elyette. "L'Apocalypse selon Saul Bellow." Le Facteur religieux en Amerique du nord. Ed. Jean Beranger. Bordeaux: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, Univ. de Bordeaux III, 1981. No. 2, Apocalypse et autres travaux: 121-42.
  
  
• Lasalle, Peter. "The Saul Bellow Speeding Ticket." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 187– 90.
  

  An anecdotal account of driving to Chicago in 1971 with the intent of taking classes from Bellow whose novels he so admired. Describes his subsequent visits to Bellow's administrative office where Bellow was currently chairing the Committee for Social Thought, Bellow's manner, his magnificent suits, ties, and topcoats, and their ongoing conversations. Concludes that Bellow was as full and complete a personality as any of his characters, and indeed a "great guy" willing to take the time to mentor a would-be writer.

• Lee, Soo-Hyun. "Bellow-Malamud-Roth: Jewish Consciousness of the Self and Humanism." Journal of English Language and Literature [Korea] 36.3 (1990): 515-35.
  
  
• Lehan, Richard. "Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The Demonic Quest." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1 (1959): 181-202.
  

  After a somewhat generalized discussion of the mutual influence of the French and American modern novel, the discussion turns to the critical problem of the influence of French existentialism on Bellow's early novels.

• Lehan, Richard. "Into the Ruins: Saul Bellow and Walker Percy." A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel. Richard Lehan. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1973. 107-45.
  

  Concentrates on the dialectic between the romantic impulse and the modern apocalypse. Discusses the plight of the Bellow protagonist in terms of his French and European counterparts. Locates Bellow squarely within the traditions of French literary existentialism. A major essay.

• Lemaster, J. R. "Saul Bellow: On Looking for a Way through the Cracks." American Bypaths: Essays in Honor of E. Hudson Long. Eds. Robert G. Collmer and Jack W. Herring. Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund of Baylor UP, 1980. 109-44.
  

  Suggests that Nathan A. Scott is right in seeing Bellow as a radically religious novelist concerned about the importance of covenants made with a God who has long since died. Examines the endings of the novels to see how Bellow works out the death and contract questions. Sees evidence of Zen and Sanskrit ideas, as well as notions from Plotinus and Philo. Concludes that Bellow's novels are interesting because of their theoretical, religious and theological concerns, not just for their social realism.

• Leonard, John. "Novelist Deals with Jews in America." New York Times 22 Oct. 1976: A1, A10.
  

  Describes Bellow's fiction as an account of the Jewish romance with America, and provides a thumbnail sketch of each of his works as he applauds Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• Levenson, J. C. "Bellow's Dangling Men." Critique 3.3 (1960): 3–14. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 39–50.
  

  Discusses the phenomenon of the sociologically marginal or "dangling man" in American literature from James Fenimore Cooper forward. Sees these earlier prototypes as invigorating Bellow's characters with their energy and exuberance, plus their determination to wrest from the American experience their freedom. Traces also the Russian influences on the shapes of these Bellow heroes, as well as the Jewish influences. Deals with each of the novels up to HRK.

• Lombardo, Agostino. "La narrativa di Saul Bellow." [Saul Bellow's Fiction]. Studi Americani 11 (1965): 309–44.
  

  Argues that the Bellow novel is a means to face life and the crowds. Writing is having faith in both art and man. Bellow portrays the modern city and the stress city life brings to men. Describes Joseph's attempt in DM to become free. Compares Bellow with other contemporary authors, including Singer. Shows how every character portrait adds to the setting and discusses Bellow's Jewish element, the search for daily, popular language. Discusses how in the Bellow novel history initiates man to life. Sees the main characters as instruments to represent society.

• Lombardo, Agostino. Realismo e Simbolismo: Saggi di letteratura americana contemporanea. Biblioteca di Studi Americani 3. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1957.
  
  
• Ludwig, Jack Barry. Recent American Novelists. University of Michigan Pamphlets on American Writers 22. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1962. 7–18.
  

  Discusses Bellow and other contemporary American writers as evidence that there has been a shift of tone and focus in American fiction. Calls Bellow and DM the sign of this shift. Provides mostly general commentary on Bellow's early works.

• Lutwack, Leonard. "Bellow's Odysseys." Heroic Fiction: The Epic Tradition and American Novels of the Twentieth Century. Leonard Lutwack. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. 88–121.
  

  Discusses the journey metaphor and the use of the myth of Odysseus in the Bellow novel. Provides a detailed exegesis of Herzog as Odyssean wanderer. Comments at length on the mock epic elements in the novels and other attributes of heroic literature. Concludes with an analysis of MSP.

• Lycette, Ronald L. "Saul Bellow and the American Naturalists." Discourse 13.4 (1970): 435–49.
  

  Argues that because Bellow is a social novelist: "He occupies a place in an American tradition of naturalism that extends, by some arguments, as far back as Melville." Sees Bellow as representing "an evolution beyond naturalism because his characters refuse to accept defeat." Compares Bellow with naturalists who precede him, and who are contemporaneous with him. Emphasizes Bellow's stress on the melting pot, the deterministic necessities of it, and on his appraisal of what it means to be less than human. Concludes with the observation that the element of optimism makes Bellow different from other naturalists.

• Lyons, Bonnie. "Bellowmalamudroth and the American Jewish Genre—Alive and Well." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 5.2 (1979): 8–10. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  

  Examines whether or not there was ever a recognizable school of Jewish–American fiction, and whether such a genre can be seen coming to an end. Concludes that American–Jewish fiction is surviving largely because of the postwar writers, including Bellow.

• Oates, Joyce Carol. "Imaginary Cities: America." Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Eds. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers UP, 1981. 11–33.
  

  Claims that for Bellow the city is depicted as "an archetype of amoral dynamism" as well as a place of congestion and drama. Oates argues that the cityscapes in AAM are to be compared only with Joyce's Dublin cityscapes. Goes on to discuss a variety of novels and stories from this perspective. Concludes that the Bellow hero is always able to transcend the limitations imposed on him by the city.

• O'Connell, Shaun. "Bellow: Logic's Limits." Massachusetts Review 10 (Winter 1969): 182–87.
  

  Briefly discusses the issue of Bellow's "obsession" with "knowing" and the limits of mere logic. Sees Bellow dramatizing the theme of logic's limits in a series of "beautiful stories portraying people who think themselves in the damndest fixes, neither able to control life with their ideas nor protect themselves from life with their rationalizations."

• Opdahl, Keith M. "The Discussion: Refining the Issues." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 5.2 (1979): 15. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  
  
• Opdahl, Keith M. "God's Braille: Concrete Detail in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 4.2 (1978): 60–71. Joint issue with Yiddish 3.3 (1978).
  

  Praises Bellow's style for its remarkable concrete detail which adds meaning and signification to the realism of the text. Describes the style at its best as simple, direct, lacking ornamentation, transparent and supple. Goes on to describe the process by which Bellow has achieved this technique.

• Opdahl, Keith. "Prospects and Perspectives: A View From the Balcony."
  

  Examines the many reasons why a current generation of college students have never read him. Speculates that ultimately he, Faulkner, and Hemingway will be considered the three great twentieth-century novelists. Sees Bellow's strength to be in his intellectual powers, liberal humanism, and insistence on high culture, belief in art as superior consciousness, ability to create portraits of the age, unforgettable characters, his linguistic fireworks, elegant style, famously luminous scenes. Commends the Chekhovian detail, his intimations of the spirit, and his dramatizations of an oppressive world.

• Opdahl, Keith M. "Saul Bellow and the Function of Representational Feeling." Delta 19 (Oct. 1984): 31–45.
  

  Praises Bellow for achieving a rare vitality of style and for taking mimesis a layer or two deeper than it has gone before. Argues that he achieves this by fitting the sequence and content of his words to the process of the imagination. Describe what the process is and how feeling is not conveyed as a mind-movie but much more subtly until he arrives at an effect he calls "representational feeling."

• Opdahl, Keith M. "Stillness in the Midst of Chaos: Plot in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 15–28.
  

  Notes how Bellow flirts with loose, episodic plots in order to be interesting. Suggests, however, that Bellow is, in fact, absorbed with plot. His plots maintain a rational order, as do those of the nineteenth-century realists. Analyzes what obstacles to plot-making Bellow must overcome. Describes what elements of style, theme or vision cause him difficulty and why.

• Opdahl, Keith M. "Strange Things, Savage Things: Saul Bellow's Hidden Theme." Iowa Review 10.4 (1979): 1–15.
  

  Argues that "sex [and sensuality] are everywhere and permeates Bellow's imaginative world with an overwhelming presence and yet is seldom remarked by the protagonist." Sees the characters as victims of the forces that lie behind sexuality, "so that the anger of their women is nothing compared to the threat that lies just beyond the vision—the threat of an immense and angry force to which sexuality belongs." Gives the canon a structuralist reading from this perspective. Broadens out into a discussion of how the sensual is what bridges the gap in Bellow fiction between social and metaphysical awareness.

• Opdahl, Keith M. "True Impressions: Saul Bellow's Realistic Style." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum voor Taal-en Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. 61–71. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.), 10–11 Dec. 1977.
  

  Gives a formalistic explication of Bellow's use of concrete detail and several other aspects of style.

• Oppel, Horst. Die Suche nach Gott in der Amerikanischen Literatur der Gegenwart [The Search for God in Modern American Literature]. Abhandlung der Geistes und Sozial-wissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1972, 8. Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur; Weisbaden: In Kommission bei. F. Steiner, 1972. Cited in Year's Works in English Studies, 1972.
  
  
• Ozick, Cynthia. ?Throwing Away the Clef.? New Republic 22 May 2000: 27?31.
  

  A detailed, eloquent, and lengthy essay on the roman ? clef, literary fascination of fictional simulacra, and the many frenziedly brilliant intellectuals who have previously inhabited Bellow?s fiction. States that Bellow and Bloom are cognitive companions for whom the ABliss? of the idea is everything. Yet Bloom is a pile of electrons and is dead while Ravelstein, his simulacra, lives. Bellow is a sentence and paragraph fiddler, a rabbi presiding over words and engaging verbal sculpture. Image upon image, he builds Ravelstein, a mightiness which is finally undone. Comments on the general Jewishness of this novel, and the success of the enterprise. A major essay.

• Nanda, Ram Shankar. "Saul Bellow and the Rejection of Modernist Ideology." Literature and Politics in Twentieth-Century America. Ed. J. L. Plakkoottam and Prashant K. Sinha. Hyderabad: American Studies Research Center, 1993. 86–91.
  

  Argues that at the center of Bellow's world lies a desperate search for the answer to the question of what it means to be truly human. Examines this in AM, TV, and H. Sees freedom of choice to be Bellow's answer to the question.

• Narasaki, Hiroshi. "Saul Bellow and the Early 1940's: A Critical Heritage." American Literature in the 1950's.: Annual Report 1976. Tokyo: Tokyo Chapter of the American Literature Society of Japan, 1977. 41–49.
  

  Outlines the prevailing modes of American fiction of the decade, then discusses Bellow in relation to them. Concentrates mostly on the metaphor of dangling.

• Neumarkt, Paul. "Saul Bellow's Foreword to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 14.3–4 (1993): 220–22.
  

  Begins with an extensive quote from Bellow's "Foreword" concerning the soul. Admires the works from several points of view including the notion of evolutionary psychology. Questions the statement: "For to put the matter at its baldest, we live in a thought world, and the thinking has gone bad indeed." Calls Bellow's concept of "the thought world" the sine qua non of evolutionary psychology, but calls this a psychological oversimplication and a shift away from the soul–searching process of individuation onto the level of powerful clichés. Asks if man's thinking has "gone bad," or if it is just Bellow's nod to pacify the average political, financial, and pragmatic cliches. Links this train of thought to that of Theodore Schroder, founder of the school of evolutionary psychology, and develops the connections with regard to the human process of individuation.

• Nevius, Blake. "Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen [Helsinki] 73 (1972): 248–60.
  
  
• Newton, Adam Zachary. "From Exegesis to Ethics: Recognition and Its Vicissitudes in Saul Bellow and Chester Himes." South Atlantic Quarterly 95:4 (1996): 979-1007.
  

  Pairs Bellow's Jewish text, TV, with Chester Himes "If He Hollers Let Him Go" because both texts enact a covert exegesis into political and ethical exigency, into an ethical politics of recognition. Argues that literary history and criticism alike are venues of social space, a space formed by ligatures. The binding ties which such interventionist readings forge or create, as "intertextuality signify a critical task as much as a property of the texts themselves. Argues that a dynamic engagement places these novels in a relationship of genuine tension, facing off in a textual encounter because they "dialogize" literary intervention by Jews and Blacks in autoethnography. Describes several embodied thematic patterns within both novels including face, physiognomy, hue, caste, and divisions between "they" and "we." Employs Levinasian theory of the face of the Other in order to examine the 1) phenomenological ethics of Jewishness and Blackness, 2) the unreconstructed grammar of cultural tragedy and racism, and 3) those places where these novels feature recognition, racial encounter, and the Levinasian transcendent encounter between two human faces

• Nielsen, Don L. F. "Humorous Contemporary Jewish–American Authors: An Overview of the Criticism." MELUS 21.4 (1996): 71–101.
  
  
• Nilsen, Helge Normann. "Bellow and Transcendentalism: From The Victim to Herzog." Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 14.2 (1984): 125–39. Rpt. in Saul Bellow: The Man and His Work. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Delhi: B. R. Pub., 2000. 165–81.
  

  Traces elements of transcendentalism throughout all the novels up to and including H. Comments at length on the use of the language of transcendentalism and mysticism, as well as overt reference to existentialist thinkers and tenets.

• Nilsen, Helge Normann. "Helt e!ler klovn? Omkring noen uloste konflikter i Saul Bellows forfatterskap" [Hero or Clown? On Certain Unresolved Conflicts in Saul Bellow's Work]. Edda (1980): 93–102.
  
  
• Nilsen, Helge Normann. "Saul Bellow and Wilhelm Reich." American Studies in Scandinavia 10 (1978): 81–91.
  

  Shows Bellow's complex attitude toward Reichianism in SD and HRK. Rather than espousing the philosophy wholeheartedly, as previous critics have suggested (Nilsen's view), Nilsen claims that Bellow treats Reichian ideas ironically, comically and ambivalently.

• Nilsen, Helge Normann. "Trends in Jewish–American Prose: A Short Historical Survey." English Studies 64.6 (1983): 507–17.
  
  
• Noble, David W. "The Present: Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow." The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel Since 1830. David W. Noble. New York: Grosset, 1968. 195–223.
  
  
• Normand, J. "L'Homme Mystifie: Les Heros de Bellow, Albee, Styron et Mailer." Etudes Anglaises 22.4 (1969): 370–85.
  
  

• Pal, K. S. "Saul Bellow: Motion Stillness." The Literary Endeavor.' A Quarterly Journal Devoted to English Studies 4.1–2 (1982): 58–63.
  

  Describes the motifs and themes of motion and stillness in the Bellow canon, and some characters as embracing one quality, other characters its opposite. Mr. Sammler is a mystical still point of resolution between the two opposing principles. Motion is posited against stillness as a fictional strategy. Though as an artist Bellow maintains a consistent tension between stillness and motion, "focus remains on the ideal of stillness which signifies a way of life dependent upon peace, joy and solitude."

• Parini, Jay. ?The Fictional Campus: Sex, Power, and Despair.? Chronicle of Higher Education 22 Sept. 2000: B12?B13.
  

  Sees R as the latest in a long series of satirical novels about campus life. Argues that R is an extremely accurate portrait of campus life and characters. Calls Ravelstein an oddball academic down at heels philosopher? who Aprances and preens.? Comments about the summer that Allan Bloom was called the Queen of the Jews by his students when he taught at Dartmouth. Calls him a brilliant rogue who zooms across the culture gap from high to low culture which Chick and the readers revel in his complexities. Notes that R is both realistic and fantastic while Chick, for his part, is a trustworthy narrator, despite his self-confessed flaws. Concludes that Bellow obviously finds the campus a useful, controlled universe in which to conduct explorations into the human condition.

• Pauwels de la Ronciere, Marie-Christine. "Bellow's Hero and the Reality Instructors: Just a Punch and Judy Show?" Saul Bellow Journal 9.2 (1990): 29–37.
  

  Comments first on how all of Bellow's novels are structured as double identity quests dealing with a hero caught in the culture of his European forefathers on the one hand and pragmatic America on the other. Claims that on the existential level Bellow shows the predicament of a man of thought and feeling who must attempt to live a meaningful life within the emotional and spiritual barrenness of the contemporary world. Then concentrates on how the Reality Instructors encountered by all of Bellow's heroes show Bellow's ambivalence regarding both their teachings and the hero's commitment/withdrawal strategy as Bellow employs different humorous forms, from the comic-aggressive Punch and Judy humor to more elaborate forms such as irony and self-derogation. Concludes that in the later novels, MDH in particular, there are no more accommodationist or light-hearted endings, and that while it would be premature to assume that pessimism has stifled the affirmative voice, critics would do well to measure the philosophical question of commitment versus withdrawal in Bellow's fiction.

• Pauwels, Marie Christine. "Entre farce bouffonne et ironie: L'humour protéiforme de Saul Bellow." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 41–57.
  
  
• Pauwels de la Ronviere, Marie-Christine. "Visual and Intellectual Humor in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4.2 (1991): 241–50.
  

  Argues that humor in Bellow's texts is cerebral, caustic, ironic and self-derogatory. Describes his revels in slapstick, farce and situational humor, as well as in comic characterization. Notes that though Punch-and-Judy humor is not commonly associated with Bellow, behind this Jewish ironist is a true American humorist who revives the riproarious days of American frontier humor with its knack for tall tale, bombast, and exuberant characters.

• Pavilioniene, Ausrine. "Herojaus auka ankstyvojoje Solo Belou kuryboje." Literatura 24.3 (1982): 20–30.
  
  
• Pearce, Richard. "The Walker: Modern American Hero." Massachussets Review 5 (1964): 761–64.
  
  
• Petilion, Pierre-Yves. "De La 'Culture' en Amerique." Critique [Paris] 33 (1977): 27–46. [In French]
  
  
• Petillon, Pierre-Yves. "Les Derniers Jours: Signaux de vie." Critique [Paris] 38. (1982): 983–98. [In French]
  
  
• Petillon, Pierre-Yves. La Grand route: Espace et ecriture en Amerique. Fiction & Cie. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 60–65, 76–82, 114–18, 126–33. [In French]
  
  
• Phillips, William. "Intellectuals and Writers since the Thirties." Partisan Review 59.4 (1992): 531–58.
  

  A Roundtable discussion moderated by William Phillips, Editor of Partisan Review with the following participants: Edith Kurzweil, William Phillips, Czeslaw Milosc, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Brodsky, and Saul Bellow. Its topic is a discussion about the differences between the United States and Eastern and Central Europe. Generally focuses on the leading role of writers and intellectuals in the liberation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Bellow's own remarks focus on the legacy of Enlightenment thinkers concerning social contract, civil war, tyranny, poverty and internal chaos. He discusses the erosion of Enlightenment thinking in modern philosophy and the fate of spiritual matters. Concentrates mostly on Eastern Europe. Makes careful distinctions between intellectuals and writers. Speaks on: the triumph of popular culture in the East, the grip of technology, the shrinking sphere of the writer, aesthetic illiteracy, the failure of the universities, the attack on male privilege, the fate of art and the collective turning away from social contract, the shift from high art, and the ultimate power of the soul.

• Phillips, Adam. ?Bellow and Ravelstein.? Raritan 20.2 (2000): 1?10.
  

  Considers the heroes of Bellow?s fiction to be unassailable, attentive to other people?s airs, living within themselves and irreparably damaged by life. However, unlike everyone else they are astonishingly articulate, learned, and amused by their own predicaments as they luxuriate in words and things. Argues that, in these respects, R is centrally within the Bellow tradition, and grandly destitute. Bellow has always wanted to know what deadbeats and professors would make of one another. Sees Ravelstein and Chick as sticklers for the noble life, determinedly stylish, and overly fascinated with sophistication. In this respect, they are mirror images of one another. Sees R as very much a fiction about biography in which there is no straining for effect since it is so naturally fluent. In it Bellow points out that people are always speaking and writing from other people?s points of view, on their behalf, and speaking in their own voices back to them. Beneath this lies the private sense of self which is difficult to account for. Accuses Bellow of "Platonizing? Bloom?s homosexuality and comments that, notwithstanding this, Bellow has always written best about love between men. Argues lengthily that, in the fictional world of R, homosexuality is not so much invisible as plausible. Ravelstein, this endlessly diverting character, is never seen in this novel operating sexually. Hence Chick is diverting us, his readers. Concludes that this is not Bellow?s last novel because Bellow is just beginning to say new and serious things about such evasions and sexual recklessness.

• Pifer, Ellen. "Bellow's Career as a Writer: A Winner's Critique of Success."
  

  Delineates Bellow's eschewing of the paradoxical nature of the American obsession with money, American inability to escape the crushing weight of the everyday world, and the futility of numerous American evasions. From HRK to HG, DD, and MDH, Bellow's seekers cast off the creature comforts as they take up the quest for meaning, value, truth. Even in a novel as early as TV (1947), published when Bellow's own career was still being launched, the young writer examines the shadow-side of America's faith in material success. Exploring this theme in his shorter works of fiction as well, Bellow abandons the expansive structure of the quest motif for more compressed methods and effects. In works as various as SD, "Mosby's Memoirs," AT, and BC, he exposes with particular clarity the paradoxical nature of human success: the tension between palpable profits and human loss, between the material demands of life and its spiritual requirements. Concludes that in most of Bellow's fictions we identify with the winner's hidden losses and the loser's secret gains.

• Pifer, Elen. "Bellow's New World Babylon." Humanities Sept./Oct. 1988: 27–29.
  

  Notes that Saul Bellow has placed the urban metropolis—primarily Chicago, but also New York and Bucharest—at the heart of his fiction. But this urban environment depicts not only a specific locale, but evokes a universal condition. For Bellow, metropolitan life is the central phenomenon of Western culture engraved with modern history, and apocalyptic in its portents. It is for him the manifestation of misplaced faith and the product of materialism. Concludes that one of the fortunate paradoxes of Bellow's novels is that while supplying all the evidence needed to justify withdrawal, he has held out in the city.

• Pifer, Ellen. "If the Shoe Fits: Bellow and Recent Critics." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29.4 (1987): 442–57.
  

  Pifer details the dangers of such procrustean endeavors, while recognizing the need to bring order to the critical task. Her discussion of the successes and failures of recent Bellow criticism includes detailed commentary on such work as: Jeanne Braham's A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow's Fiction, Daniel Fuchs's Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, articles by

• Pifer, Ellen. "Winners and Losers: Bellow's Dim View of Success." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 129–40.
  

  Discusses Bellow's theme of disengagement from America's dollar drive and all the codes and values that fuel America's obsession with "making it" in HRK, HG, MDH, and BC. In each of these novels Bellow's seekers cast off creature comfort as they take up a quest for meaning, value, truth, and enlarged views of reality. Concludes with a discussion of BC as the capstone piece of fiction in which his characters successes and failures are subjected to the searchlight of imaginative language and moral vision. To members of a society obsessed by memory banks, data pools, and statistical graphs Bellow's fiction brings more ancient knowledge to light: knowledge of the winner's hidden losses and the loser's secret gains.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Does Saul Bellow Still Matter?" Midstream Feb.-Mar. 1990: 34–37.
  

  A rambling grab-bag essay which begins with concerns about how Bellow strikes the with-it and au courant as "unfashionable" with his unashamed talk of the human soul and humanistic high tone. Defends Bellow's high-mindedness, neo-conservatism, misogyny, and preachiness by pointing to public praise for Bellow, and admits that most people who continue to invest heavily in Bellow as a blue-chip literary stock tend to be academics. Proceeds to a brief critique of Cronin and Goldman's Saul Bellow in the 1980's as a project designed with high expectations and very large promises. Complains that the work is neither distinctive, provocative nor exciting, even though he concedes the eighteen essays represent a fair sampling of what academic critics thought and said about Bellow in the 1980's (1989). Concludes with a loosely organized set of comments on AT and BC, returning in the conclusion to "Yes! in Thunder" Bellow matters, to academics, and many others.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Imagining American Reality." Southern Review 29.4 (1993): 767–81.
  

  Considers the issue of what constitutes reality in Bellow's fiction and how this relates to Bellow's deepest questioning about "What all this [decaying urban landscape] speaks for man?" (DM). Argues that no matter how much Bellow anchors his fiction in the quotidian world, his inner eye remains fixed on airier, more transcendental realms. In this broadly-based article Bellow is considered along with a variety of other twentieth-century writers.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Jewish American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead." Modern Fiction Studies 35.2 (1989): 223–35.
  

  Although this article is primarily about Ozick and Roth, Pinsker makes frequent mention of AAM, H, and HG. Also discusses the use of letter writing as an index of the psychic agitation in all these novelists, as well as their seemingly common need to memorialize.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "The Jewish–American Writer and the Novel of Ideas." Midstream Jan. 1989: 33–37.
  

  Discusses some of the special ways Jewish–American fictionists wrestle with the relation of ideas to their creative work. Traces the history of Bellow and Delmore Schwartz from ambition and fierce independence to combativeness and deep-seated ambivalence. Covers a variety of Bellow's characters in the course of this discussion.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Meditations Interruptus: Saul Bellow's Ambivalent Novel of Ideas." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PA] 4.2 (1978): 22–32. Joint issue with Yiddish 3.3 (1978).
  

  Suggests that alternations in Bellow's early works between "claustrophobic intensity and imaginative space, between exercises in moral seriousness and wildly comic celebrations" actually form a synthesis in Bellow's later work. In these later works "Saul Bellow cannot avoid imparting his own considerable intelligence to the novels he writes, but neither can he avoid adding those strains which make him our richest chronicler of modern life's continuing comedy."

• Pinker, Sanford. "Mental Design and the Urban Landscape: Saul Bellow's Ambivalent Cities."
  

  Discusses the pervasiveness of what he calls "mental design" which threads its way through Bellow's canon, nearly always in conjunction with cityscapes against which his more sensitive protagonists' attempt to negotiate the demanding terms of the individual soul. The resulting tensions—many comic, some grimmer—are exercises in the exploration of the city. Focuses on H, MSP, and HG, showing how history and the ambivalent visions it creates permeate this trilogy. Concludes that the city gives Bellow's fiction its textures and rhythms, and reveals the increasingly complicated mental designs that surround us all.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "The Psychological Schlemiel of Saul Bellow." The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP; London: Feffer, 1971. 125–57. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow's Lovesick Schlemiel." The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish Fiction. Rev. enl. ed. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
  

  Provides a definition of the archetypal schlemiel and proceeds to describe its psychological dimensions within the Bellow novel.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow and the Special Comedy of Urban Life." Ontario Review 8 (1978): 82–94. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1978.
  

  Discusses Bellow as "the most articulate geographer of the urban condition, charting its assets and liabilities against the cunning that is history and those continuing needs which comprise the human spirit." Attempts to account for Bellow's attachment to and fictional use of Chicago as home and fictional metaphor.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow Going Everywhere: History, American Letters and the Transcendental Itch." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 47–52.
  

  Explores briefly the mystical tendencies of the Bellow hero, tendencies which take him "deeper than his affinities with the Chicago Naturalists in particular, and American Realists in general." Argues that Bellow heroes inevitably plumb deeper than real facts and encounter realms of mystical experience.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and John Updike." Jewish–American Fiction, 1917–1987. Sanford Pinsker. Twayne's United States Authors Series 606. New York: Twayne, 1992. 105–36.
  

  In this chapter on several major American writers and Jewish–American material, Bellow is described as using his Jewish material in personal and immediate ways. Bellow's progress has been a matter of integrating such material with the fabric of American literature, of blending the feel for Yiddish prose rhythms, and having an ear for literary parody. Reruns all of the novels in terms of plot and theme. Concludes that Bellow has attempted to present his sense of urban comedy and lovesick meditators in order to bring a sense of humane order to the chaos of contemporary culture.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow, Soren Kierkegaard and the Question of Boredom." Centennial Review 24.1 (1980): 118–25.
  

  Argues convincingly that Charlie Citrine's thesis and Bellow's throughout the novels is Kierkegaard's theory on the relationship between existential boredom and universal psychic pain. The Kierkegaaridan influence on Bellow results in his way of "simultaneously indulging in an orgy of ideas and maintaining a necessary, ironic balance, of inviting serious critical attention and keeping a firm grip of the critic's leg." Both Bellow and Kierkegaard make extremely witty remarks about the subject of boredom. Traces several other parallels between the two writers.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow: 'What, in all of this, speaks for man?'" Georgia Review 49.1 (1995): 89–95.
  

  Argues that Bellow is one of the few contemporary American writers one can confidently imagine still being celebrated at our Tricentennial because his work matters to those who care about the spiritual condition of America and American fiction. His greatness rests on the clarity of his vision and the lively, thickly textured paragraphs his vision produces, as well as on the fact that he is willing to use the word soul and to express the need for spiritual exercises in a shoddy cultural moment. In novel after novel, and story after story, his vision and style achieve definition. SD, an elegiac tale about fathers and sons told with Olympian detachment, describes "The Old System" as another useful point of entry and also functions as an extended meditation on life and a useful point of entry to the Bellow canon. Concludes that Bellow is an essentially religious writer who will undoubtedly still be celebrated at our Tricentennial, and "whose work will continue to be appreciated by that infinitely precious band of common readers who know the genuine article when they see it."

• Pinsker, Sanford. "The 'Schlemiel' in Yiddish and American Literature." Chicago Jewish Forum 25.3 (1967): 191–95.
  
  
• Pinsker, Sanford. "Sustaining Community of 'Reality Instructors': The City in Saul Bellow's Later Fiction." Studies in American Jewish Literature 3.1 (1977): 25–30.
  

  Cites Bellow as America's most articulate "geographer of the urban landscape, charting its assets and liabilities against the cunning that is history and those continuing needs which comprise the human spirit." Argues that it is the ever-present city that creates the demand for explanations in the Bellow thinker, and that it is the city which provides the ever-present community of "reality instructors."

• Podhoretz, Norman. "Bellow at 85, Roth at 67.? Commentary July/Aug. 2000: 35?43.
  

  Commends the continuing vitality of both Bellow and Roth. Sees both of them combining the high-literary and the demotic, with a spicy dash of the locutions and rhythms of Yiddish mixed in. Comments that both R and Roth?s The Human Stain use the same narrative device?memorializing through Ravelstein and Zuckerman. Both are alter brains and alter egos for the authors. Both are about death, sex, metaphysics, despair, issues of political correctness, the relationship between fiction and reality, as well as authorial self-portraiture. Both are also artists? novels, monologues, and genuinely comic productions. Believes Bellow has captured Bloom with marvelous accuracy. Provides commentary of the responses of several reviewers, comments extensively on the issues surrounding Bellow?s Aouting? of Bloom, and refuses to buy into the Abetrayal? thesis. Concludes that R is an infinitely loving portrait of Bloom. A generous, mandarin, and erudite essay.

• Podhoretz, Norman. "The Adventures of Saul Bellow." Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing. Norman Podhoretz. New York: Farrar, 1964. 205–27.
  

  Calls Bellow the greatest virtuoso of language since Joyce. However, insists that Bellow's fame derives from what he had to say about the exhausted traditions of the avant-garde movement which preceded him. The discussion proceeds discursively and hits upon many of the traditional critical commonplaces.

• Podhoretz, Norman. Novel: Saul Bellow–the World of Saul Bellow. Bloomington, IN: 1967. [Motion Picture] 16 mm., b&w, 29 min.
  
  
• Pollin, Burton R. "Poe and Bellow: A Literary Connection." Saul Bellow Journal 7.1 (1988):15–26.
  

  Traces the literary influence of Poe on Bellow. Discusses his uses of Poe's "To Helen" in MDH, the Poe materials in HRK, parallels between Poe and Humboldt Von Fleischer as poete maudit types, and other allusions to Poe throughout HG. Also looks at numerous Poe allusions in MDH. Important interpretive source study.

• Porter, M. Gilbert. "Hitch Your Agony to a Star: Bellow's Transcendental Vision." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum voor Taal-en Literatuurweten-schap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. 73–88. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.), 10–11 Dec. 1977.
  

  Acknowledges Bellow's debt to Platonic and German idealism, the classical epic, Hassidic wisdom literature, Freudian psychology, Russian realism, Yiddish humor and English romanticism. Then he proceeds to discuss Bellow's major debt to the American transcendentalists under such headings as guilt, nature, democracy, death, immortality, and art.

• Porter, M. Gilbert. "Is the Going Up Worth the Coming Down? Transcendental Dualism in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 19–37. Rpt. as Saul Bellow: The Man and His Work. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Delhi: B. R. pub., 2000. 183–210.
  

  Sees Bellow's novels as representing a paradigm of longstanding tensions in American literature between pessimism and optimism, determinism and self-determination, victimization and possibility. Argues that all of Be!low's thinkers suffer from ontological dualities. Such ambivalence represents not only the dualism of Bellow's American literary ancestors, but also "the comic and tragic masks of human experience."

• Possler, Katherine E. "The Significance of Structure in Dangling Man and Humboldt's Gift." Studies in American Jewish Literature 3.1 (1977): 20–24.
  

  Draws comparisons between DM and HG in terms of seasonal structure, diary form, use of traditional Jewish holidays, common themes, and similarities in plot and character.

• Powells, M. C. "Entre farce bouffone et ironie: Phumour proteiforme de Saul Bellow." [In French]
  
  
• Prabhakar, T.,and P. Palanivel. "In Defense of tlumanity: Saul Bellow's Novels." Journal of English Studies [India] 12.1 (1980): 820–27.
  

  Discusses the Bellow canon generally pointing up Be!low's romantic and optimistic tendencies, along with his attack on modernist nihilism. Examines the novels from a traditional humanistic perspective.

• Pritchett, V. S. "Saul Bellow: Jumbos." The Tale Bearers: Essays on English, American, and Other Writers. V. S. Pritchett. London: Chatto, 1980. 146–55.
  

  Discusses Bellow's power to draw intellectual responses but complains that he disperses himself too much in the larger works. Prefers Bellow's short fiction. Comments on the perpetual sense of comedy in the novels and the outsized heroes. Concludes with commentary on Bellow's inability to "talk" a character into life through dialogue.

• Prochaska, Bernadette. "In Caverns and Caves with Saul Bellow and Walker Percy." Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research (Dordrecht) 51 (1997): 35–42.
  

  Compares Eugene Henderson of HRK and Will Barrett of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman as twentieth-century figures overwhelmed with a sense of lost direction. Henderson seeks meaning for his life through the jungles of uncivilized villages and in underground caverns in Africa. Will Barrett starts at ground zero in Central Park of a civilized country's most sophisticated city, New York. At the end of both novels the protagonists have descended into the underground and have encountered the beast. Both men have been changed in their apprehension of themselves. Both men move toward integration into community. The caverns and caves of their experience yield an abundance of joy to their renewed existence, where they discover possibility of the garden in an ever-sullied universe.

• perpetuate and legitimate misconceptions in the guise of predictable, generalized artistic arguments.
  
  

• Sachdeva, Indivar. "Mr. Bellow's Planet." Financial Express [India] 4 Aug. 1986: 5.
  
  
• Salzberg, Joel. "Malamud to Bellow, Bellow to Malamud: A Correspondence." Bernard Malamud Society Newsletter 5 (1995): 1, 3–6.
  

  Contains the text of several letters exchanged between Bellow and Malamud, plus a framing essay on how the letters were discovered, their time period, scope, and content. Particularly useful for scholars of AAM,. and those tracing early influences on Malamud. Concludes that these letters give interesting glimpses of two serious writers loving life and literature. Provides a rare glimpse of two literary friends.

• Sanavio, Piero. "II Romanzo di Saul Bellow." Studi Americani 2 (1956): 261–84. [In Italian]
  
  
• Saposnik, Irving S. "Bellow, Malamud, Roth . . . . . . . and Styron? or One Jewish Writer's Response." Judaism 123 (1982): 322–32.
  

  Talks of these three writers in terms of the degree to which their protagonists seem to have stopped fleeing the world of their fathers and accepted the world they live in.

• Sposnik, Irving S."Yasha Mazur and Harry Houdini: The Old Magic and the New." Studies in American Jewish Literature I (1981): 52–60.
  
  
• Sarma, G. V. L. N. "Saul Bellow and the Indian Intellectual." Journal of English Studies [India] 12.1 (1980): 828–32.
  

  Discusses in brief outline the basic Jewish values in the novels and how these correlate with such basic tenets of Indian life as Gemiluth Chasadim, or "a making good to fellow men for the glory of God."

• Sarotte, George-Michel. "Le temperament feminin-masochiste de certains personnages juifs." comme un frere, comme un amant: l'homesexuality masculine dans le roman et la theatre americains de Herman Melville a James Baldwin. Paris: Flammarion, 1976. 245–53. [In French]
  
  
• Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. History of American Thought and Culture. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 50–53, passim.
  

  Discusses the dominance of late forties formalism and its constraining influence on narrative form in those years. Comments that Bellow's response to this has been to speak on behalf of form and restraint in culture, while nevertheless remembering the need to escape them at the beginning of his career. Discusses Bellow's own comments on the "well-made" character of his first two novels and the looseness and intimacy of AM. Develops this argument as part of an essay which deals also with Updike, Mailer, Trilling, Ellison, Burroughs, and Percy. Concludes with a brief discussion of DM and TV.

• Schaumberger, Nancy E. "The Last Gentleman: A Fiction Illustrating the Psychopathology of Everyday Life." Thirteenth International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Pereira Frederico. Lisbon: Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, 1997. 163–67. (Cited in Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature.)
  
  
• Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. "Die Farbe als dichterisches Gestalt-ungsmittel in den Romanen Saul Bellows." Sprachkunst 2 (1971): 243–64.
  
  
• Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. "Saul Bellow's Humor and Saul Bellow's Critical Reception." Delta 19 (Oct. 1984): 47–65.
  

  Considers Bellow as a serious writer in the Arnoldian sense, and as a humorist. Shows how his early critical reception ignored this humorous aspect of the novels, which she goes to some lengths to define. Discusses HG and MSP in terms of their humor and critical reception.

• Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. "Saul Bellow and the Values of the Western World." Saul Bellow Journal 8.2 (1989): 1–13.
  

  Discusses her experiences as an inferior Westerner while teaching in China, and the Chinese construction of American literary history as the tradition of alienation, imperialism, materialism, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. Goes on to talk about her attempts to use Bellow as an example of a positive writer to balance out the Chinese conception of American culture as decadent, degraded, and despairing. Sums up Bellow's anti-modernist stance in several of his novels, and points out his use of American heritage as a celebration of diversity, possibility, and choice. Concludes that Bellow's polemic is a normative, almost Judaic didactic, and certainly a morally impassioned defense of life.

• Scheffler, Judith. "Two-Dimensional Dynamo: The Female Character in Saul Bellow's Novels." Wascana Review 16.2 (1981): 3–19.
  

  Sees a "passive, introspective protagonist" surrounded by "female eccentrics" who, though essential to the development of plot and theme, and even the characterization of the protagonist, seldom "draw breath of their own in the novels."

• Schøtt-Kristensen, Lene. "Saul Bellow's Moral Masochists." American Studies in Scandinavia 27.1 (1995): 1–18.
  

  Examines four of Bellow's great sufferers: Asa Leventhal, Tommy Wilhelm, Eugene Henderson, and Moses Herzog. Argues that even the non-Jew, Henderson, has his origins in a Jewish heritage of suffering. However, as modern secular Jews they go on looking for the hidden meaning of their pain. In these characters suffering is expressed through ambiguity, pathos, irony, and comedy. Furthermore, we are never quite sure whether it is ennobling, potentially redemptive, or neurotic and destructive. Suggests that while ennobling suffering seems to have the upper hand in the earlier novels, the opposite seems to be the case in the later novels.

• Schraepen, Edmond. "The Rhetoric of Saul Bellow's Novels." Rhetoric et Comunication: Actes du Congres de Rouen, 1976. Societe des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Superieur. Etudes Anglaises 75. Paris: Didier, 1979.
  
  
• Schroeter, James. "Saul Bellow and Individualism." Etudes de Lettres ser. 4. 1.1 (1978): 3–28. Rpt. in Lausanne: faculté des lettres de l'Université de Lausanne, 1978.
  

  Uses the occasion of Bellow's Nobel Prize to raise questions about the nature of Bellow's accomplishment in relation to other recipients of the prize. Notes that they all have in common a very uneasy relationship to tradition. Maps Bellow's complex attitudes toward individualism, his critical rejection of certain aspects of it and his uncritical celebration of other aspects of it. Treats each novel fully in light of these tensions, quoting key passages and providing detailed explication. A major article.

• Schulz, Max F. "Saul Bellow and the Burden of Selfhood." Radical Sophistication: Studies in Contemporary Jewish–American Novelists. Max F. Schulz. Athens, OH: Ohio U P, 1969. 110–53.
  

  Demonstrates the anti-positivist thrust of Bellow's fiction and elaborates on the issue of freedom from divisions within and without faced by the protagonists. Relates Be!low's thought to that of Blake with respect to mistrust of reason and intellect. Emphasizes how the Bellow hero opts constantly for human experience rather than intellectual abstractions. Notes the numerous bondage images throughout the novels. A generally admiring essay which concludes "Bellow would have us realize that order does not issue necessarily out of conformity, that human well-being does not depend upon totalitarian methods, that virtue does not come in ready-made packages."

• Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Bellow's Vision of the 'AxialLines.'" Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Notre Dame: IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1973. 101–49.
  

  An expanded version of the essay "Sola Gratia—The Principle of Bellow's Fiction," published in his book Craters of the Spirit: Studies in the Modern Novel (1968). Concentrates on the issues of morality, grace and transcendence in the novels. A major essay.

• Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Sola Gratia—The Principle of Bellow's Fiction." Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. 27–57. Rpt. in Craters of the Spirit: Studies in the Modern Novel. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Washington, DC: Corpus, 1968. 253–65.
  

  Denounces those who, after witnessing the great outpouring of novelistic talent in the 20's and 30's, would declare the novel in the postwar era dead. Cites Bellow, among others, as evidence that it is not. Condemns Geismar for reducing Bellow to a mere social historian and Klein for his circular definition that Bellow characters are "reducible to a single problem: to meet with a strong sense of self the sacrifice of self demanded by social circumstance." Scott proceeds to show how the Bellow hero transcends the pressures of environment and engages with the larger issues at the heart of phenomenology. A major essay.

• Scrafford, Barbara L. "Saul Bellow's Maternal Icon." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1992): 65–71.
  

  Observes that Bellow's novels have been largely dominated by a male protagonist who, like Moses Herzog, owes much of his suffering to the women in his life and to whom, like Asa Leventhal, women are largely irrelevant. With the exception of "Leaving the Yellow House," Bellow's females have always been relegated to the realm of supporting secondary characters. However, in a dramatic switch from his male-dominated world, Bellow's recent novellas all contain prominent, central female characters. The woman in "What kind of a Day Did You Have?" AT, and BC are not such an abrupt departure as they may first appear to be. All three—Katrina, Clara, and Sorella have much in common with the maternal figures of the author's earlier works. Applies some psychoanalytic concepts to interpreting these characters, and locates a mystical maternal icon in Mother Herzog and Sorella, who exhibit an earthly and pragmatic femininity denied to others. Concludes with a portrait of Sorella in which he suggests she combines the maternal instincts of Mother Herzog, the girth of Aunt Zipporah, and a nobility of her own, thus combining all the qualities Herzog associates with the women of his childhood and the past of the unnamed narrator of BC.

• Shaw, Peter. "The Tough Guy Intellectual." Critical Quarterly 8.1 (1966): 13–28.
  

  Traces the cult of the tough guy intellectual under various and sundry American presidencies. Cites Bellow's break with the Hemingway tough guy cult and his tendencies toward accommodation rather than nihilism. Provides a brief overview of the canon as he develops this thesis.

• Shear, Walter. "Bellow's Fictional Rhetoric: The Voice of the other." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. New York: AMS, 1996. 189–202.
  

  Although Bellow is one of America's most intellectual novelists, a writer who forces his characters to examine their lives, he is oddly frustrated about the value of ideas as vital components of contemporary living. Truth for these protagonists comes in blows because it is often judgemental and objective than sympathetically subjective and because it seems absolute in its retrospecitive tendencies. The future for his characters is always the necessary possibility in their visions, but its promises seem to depend on their laying hold of that totality which has been their existence. One reason for their predicament is Bellow's liberal notion of the intellect, its hopeful openness, its simultatnious faith in external validities and external authenticities, its sympatheic, vulnerable sensitivity to a world of otherness and its struggle against despair in its negotiation with such a world. Discusses each of Bellow's books as they reflect the tradition of the liberal novel in which the world of exterior relationships, civility, and moral enlargement exist in dynamic tension with discovery.

• Shechner, Mark. "The Conversion of the Jews." The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays. Ed. Mark Shechner. New Directions in American Studies. New York: St. Martins, 1990. 1–16.
  

  Discusses the predominance of American–Jewish writers in the 1945–1960 movement. Examines the question of where the Jewish presence came from, what it consisted of, and why it flourished when it did. Argues that the rise of the Jewish novelist arose out of reverence for the book, for the life of the mind, and out of a certain kind of brooding introspection. Examines the emergence of Bellow into this movement of spiritual confusion, turmoil and conflict. Out of this has come a more brooding, introspective, studiously melancholy, occasionally neurotic, painfully self-conscious, and slyly Russian mood. Bellow's sultry inferiority and technically advanced fictions made the human heart the battlefield of history. Bellow and many of these writers are Romantics in their egotistical, self-assertive, sometimes fanatical, and embarrassedly naked neediness. They are invested in the romantic project of becoming rather than the classical ethos of being.

• Shechner, Mark. "Down in the Mouth with Saul Bellow." American Review 23 (1975): 40–77. Rpt. in After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination. Mark Shechner. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987. 121–58.
  

  Comments that there is an older tradition of psychological knowledge than that of Freud available to the contemporary novelist if we look at Galen, Greek medicine, the Elizabethan theory of humors, or the more recent version of the same found in Wilhelm Reich. Sees Bellow as a "diagnostic novelist specializing in the diseases of civilization and the distortions of the emotional life that underlie them. Though the terms of the diagnosis vary, the Reichian have been the most durable. In book after book, especially from TV through H, we find repression standing opposed to liberation, boredom to ecstatic energy, blockage to breakthrough, tension to grace, and character armor to healthy genitality" (123). A major article.

• Shechner, Mark. "Jewish Writers." Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. 199–226.
  

  Describes Bellow's literary cast of mind as coming out of the militancy and depression years of the 1930s, his Hegelian preoccupation with contradiction and synthesis, and his unembarrassed pursuit of culture. Comments on his privatism, aggressive interiority, intimations of spiritual orphanage, personal ennui, and psychological estrangement. It is a literature of mourning behind which lie losses rarely expressed, but everywhere understood. Mostly discusses DM in the earlier part of this section. Concludes that as a moralist, Bellow commands his characters to face up to the givens of history and pathology.

• Shechner, Mark. "Saul Bellow and Ghetto Cosmopolitanism." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PAl 4.2 (1978): 33–44. Joint issue with Yiddish 3.3 (1978). Rpt. in rev. version as Saul Bellow; A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 125–36; The Conversion of the Jews and other Essays. Mark Shechner. New York: St. Martins, 1990. 31–42.
  

  Bellow, Roth and Malamud all share in common an awareness of their ghetto and shtetl roots. Bellow, its most prominent spokesman, exhibits this in typically Jewish humor, which contrasts the vulgarity of the "Yid" inside the sophisticated American urban Jewish intellectual. Suggests that this is best summarized by the "sudden shifting of planes up or down, the undercutting of intellectual pretension by bodily needs or deep-seated ghetto habits .... or the strained efforts to achieve a minor transcendence amid the depressingly, scatological, ordinary."

• Shechner, Mark. "Saul Bellow." The Schocken Guide to Jewish Books: Where to Start Reading about Jewish History, Literature, Culture and Religion. Ed. Barry W. Holtz. New York: Schocken, 1992. 285–87.
  

  Provides an introduction to Bellow's novels by drawing his intellectual lines of descent down through his Russian heritage, Dostoyevski, post-socialism, postwar malaise, sprawling Chicago, the failures of capitalism, and the comedic possibilities of neurosis.

• Shibuya, Yuzaburo. "Chicago: Hanzai to Shigokoro." Eigo Seinen 128.4 (1982): 209–10.
  
  
• Shibuya, Yuzaburo. "Machine, Business, Lawyers, Gangsters: Bellow no Chicago." Eigo Seinen 129 (1983): 64-65. [In Japanese].
  
  
• Shibuya, Yuzaburo. "Saul Bellow: Politics and the Sense of Reality." The Traditional and the Anti-Traditional: Studies in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Kenzaburo Ohashi. Tokyo: Tokyo Chapter of the American Literature Society of Japan, 1980. 43–56.
  

  Reviews Bellow's early associations with Trotskyism in the 1920's. Summarizes the evolution of Be!low's political thinking through a semi-chronological examination of the novels and short stories from the viewpoint of Trotskyism and totalitarianism. Points up Beliow's conversion away from Utopian political dreams to a liberal revision. Shows his abandonment of ideas concerning collectivist salvation. Concludes his early political radicalism becomes a mixed form of contemplation, antagonism, spiritualism and secularism in the sixties and seventies.

• Shulman, Robert. "The Style of Bellow's Comedy." PMLA 83.1 (1968): 109–17.
  

  Describes Bellow's particular comic style as descending through such writers as Twain, the Chicago naturalists, Yiddish humor, the English picaresque and the European existentialists. Sees all of these as most fully developed in Moby-Dick. Traces the lines of descent through Moby- Dick on down into the Bellow novels.

• Siegel, Ben. "Saul Bellow and the University as Villain." Missouri Review 6.2 (1983): 167–88. Rpt. in The American Writer and the University. Ed. Ben Siegel. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1989. 114–35.
  

  A major article drawing extensively upon Bellow's essays, interviews and novels for evidence of BeIlow's life-long antipathy for academia. Establishes nevertheless, how Bellow, like many other American novelists and poets, remains rooted in academia "while making it a frequent target."

• Siegel, Ben. "Simply Not a Mandarin: Saul Bellow as Jew and Jewish Writer." Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1995. 62–88.
  

  Provides a detailed explication of how Bellow's complicated feelings about his Jewishness are frequently difficult to reconcile, but are always challenging enough to merit close scrutiny. In his works, Bellow retraces repeatedly the Jewish familial and social elements that shaped his character and thought. Describes Bellow's rich impressions of his childhood in Montreal and later in Chicago, the intellectual culture out of which he and his Jewish family came, the legacy of Russian and Yiddish writings, twentieth-century American–Jewish attitudes towards money, as well as the spirit of emancipation found in the shtetl and in the immigrant neighborhoods. Goes on to pursue these ideas in a close reading of several of the texts. Argues that despite the fact that Bellow was raised in a strictly orthodox environment and never practiced Judaism after his bar mitzvah, he nevertheless retraces repeatedly the Jewish familial and social elements that shaped his character and thought. Even his decision to become a writer resulted from his Jewish experience. Saul Bellow obviously likes being a Jew and likes being a writer. But he does not like being called a Jewish writer. Traces in biographical detail show Bellow's Jewish upbringing, his becoming a writer, the postwar significance of his fiction, his growing Midwestern rather than Jewish identity, his Jewish heritage, and his prose style. Concludes that Bellow's H does embrace a Jewish belief in creation's essential goodness and life's ultimate worth, a viewpoint that should serve Jew and non-Jew alike.

• Siegel, Ben. "Still Not Satisfied: Saul Bellow on Art and Artists in America." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New YorK: AMS, 1996. 203–30.
  

  For many years Bellow has been unhappy with America's cultural condition. In his novels he discusses the deflation of humanistic values and standards and the country's disdain particularly for writers. In HG we see Bellow blaming the Philistines as well as the posturings and ambitions of poets and writers themselves. Among the culprits Bellow names are media intellectuals, the American university, and its humanities professors. The cumulative result is a sorry moral and cultural climate in which literature is consistently exploited. In this culture, art and narcissism equals amusement. Literary geography has alsoplayed a vital role. And Chicago and New York become glittering cities uncondusive to the artist. This produces the phenomenon of the writer as shaman. The once truely questioning spirit of the writer has often been discarded for conventional emotions. Concludes that for Bellow writers might do well to once again start thinking about thought, Enlightenment ideals, Romanticism, the transcendent and traditional humanism. But it is evident to him that they will have to do it without the help of critics. Finally argues that Bellow views this artistic isolation in America as a sorry cultural condition in the centuries last decade.

• Siegel, Lee. "Ozick Seizes Bellow." Nation Feb. 26, 1996. 34–36.
  
  
• Siegel, Naomi. "Not Enough Belly Laughs." Metro West Jewish News 49.13 (1995): 53.
  

  Briefly reviews Bellow's "The Wen" currently being performed at the American Jewish Theater under the title "Miami Stories." Calls the three plays schmalz rather than zest, and accuses them of being sophomoric. However, does find Bellow's play the evening's winner.

• Simon, Elliott M. "Betrayal and Redemption: The Transcendant Jew in the Works of Kazantzakis, Joyce, and Bellow." The Jewish Self-Portrait in European and American Literature. Eds. Hans Jürgen Schrader and Elliott M. Simon. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1996. 135–45.
  

  Betrayal that initiates a redemptive process is a recurrent theme in Nikos Kaantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Saul Bellow's H. Betrayal liberates the Jewish protagonist from those conventional relationships and social obligations, thus giving him the freedom to reformulate a more authentic identity. Iconoclastic and creative rebellion against monstrousness, and for mutability cause such a hero to escape the bondage of mind-inhibiting telelogies and aspire to the transcendent, sacred realm of his own idealized self. Bellow's self-fashioning artists use their betrayals to throw off inauthenticity and to establish their own transcendent authenticity. It purges delusions and stagnating loyalties, as well as demeaning social responsibilities. In H we see that culmination of all the earlier characters who manifest these conflicts. Traces all the betrayals in H that serve as an impetus to the reformation of self and life, including Herzog's self-betrayals. Hence his return to his decayed "bower of bliss" at the end.

• Simon, Elliott M. "Saul Bellow and the Sacrament of Betrayal." Yiddish 11.3–4 (1999): 135–58.
  

  Demonstrates that in Saul Bellow's novels, his characters experience personal and social betrayals by fathers, brothers, wives, friends, and social systems. They require an introspective self-examination, and inspire a quest for a transcendent moral vision. Each betrayal emancipates the characters from their illusions, self-deceptions, and destructive relationships as they aspire to higher moral and ethic perspectives. It is primarily through these failed relationships that Bellow confronts the monstrousness of human existence. Such betrayal is manifested on three principal levels: 1) disparity between protagonists' desire and inability, 2) competitive social conflicts between unstable characters, 3) failure of individuals to make their civilization intellectually and morally better. A major article treating most of the major.

• Singh, Amritjit. "Freedom and Failure in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Panjab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 14.2 (Oct. 1983): 133–42.
  

  Suggests that SD and MSP are good illustrations of Bellow's lasting interest in the twin themes of freedom and failure. In both novels the individual's sense of failure is shaped by his attempts to assert his individuality in the face of successful fathers, domineering siblings or friends, or the prevailing ethic of society. Tommy withholds himself from individuals and conventions all too eager to remake him in their own terms. Mr. Sammler must hold on to sanity and definitude in a world where individuality seems to have run amuck.

• Singh, Sukhbir. "Meeting with Saul Bellow." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 19–31.
  

  Pays tribute to Bellow for his treatment of modern man as a survivor who has passed through catastrophic conditions and ultimately learned how to prevail without losing his morality, identity, and sanity. Like ancient Indian writers, Bellow explores the possibilities of man's survival with dignity in the time of death and degradation. Describes his meeting with Bellow in 1995 and his extensive interview with him in the Bay State Road apartment in Boston.

• Singh, Sukhbir. "The Pretender Self and the Public Phenomenon in Saul Bellow's Novels." Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 6.2 (1989): 76–86.
  

  Argues that Bellow uses the "public phenomena,"' or allegiance to the larger body of common people, while seeking self-invented realities in isolation. Claims that when the Bellow protagonists face the truth of ordinary life it dispels their egos and makes them aware of their commonality. Traces this idea through most of the novels.

• Singh, Yashoda. "Saul Bellow and the Modern American City." Osmania Journal of English Studies [India] 17 (1981): 39–47.
  

  Points out previous critical neglect of Bellovian technique and use of language to define his vision of the city. Shows Bellow's disgust with "wasteland" visions of modern civilization, yet demonstrates his full awareness of its ugliness. Discusses how much Bellow enjoys its protean vitality and restlessness, despite the ugliness. Compares Bellow's descriptions of the city to Balzac's and Dickens. Like them, Bellow uses verbal art to transmute the brutal qualities of the city. Demonstrates his thesis through close textual analysis of the passages from DM, AAM, and HG. Shows how the intensity of the language arises from the abundance of surface detail, catalogues, color, and sound words, as well as the distinctive language of the various narrators. Hence, the city emerges as iridescent, vitally alive, and a "seething primeval sea which is shot with beauty."

• Sire, James W. "The Human Understanding of Saul Bellow." Christianity Today 21 Jan. 1977: 20, 22.
  
  
• Skvorecky, Joseph. "Saul Bellow." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 55–56.
  

  Contains a brief tribute to Bellow as one whose novels are among the most significant achievements of the world's youngest literature. In their ultimate resonances, Saul Bellow's novels echo the formations of a higher sense that is untranslatable into words. In the round about manner of fiction they strive to fulfill the DM's desire to know what we are and what we are for. Commends Bellow for his center of moral consciousness and rehabilitation of literary character.

• Smith, Carl. S. "Conclusion: Chicago and the American Literary Tradition." Chicago and the Literary Imagination, 1880–1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. 171–76.
  

  Argues that American literary traditions influenced by Chicago's metropolitanism and industrialism, the railroad, urban architecture, and the stockyards often become too rich for many of the writers who attempted to grapple with them. Bellow's characters from Augie March, to Moses Herzog, to Charles Citrine, and to Dean Corde, are all sensitive men trying to feel at home in Chicago and the modern world. DD reads like an anthology of hte major themes Chicago writers had been dealing with for years. Quotes extensively form Bellow's own comments on the subject of Chicago. Mostly explicates DD.

• Smith, Carol R. "The Jewish Atlantic–The Development of Blackness in Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 253–279.
  

  Argues that within HG, the erasure of race from history is itself contained within a highly racialized and ethnically marked structure. Julius' request for a seascape devoid of all content but sea symbolizes his desire to erase colonial depredations and construe himself purely American. This is emblematic of some of the complexities of the connections between race and national identity in Bellow, and its embeddedness in HG. The figuration of the crisis of American modernity through the representation of the quest of the alienated white male figure and the strategic deployment of "Africanist" figures is central to Bellow's work in "Looking for Mr. Green," HRK, and MSP. In these, Bellow invokes Blackness as Africanness relative to other ethnic identities such as Jewishness, in order to police a distinction between race, and ethnicity that underwrites a model of American history as elective of assimilation. Bellow anticipates Gilroy's insistence on a racialized understanding of the Enlightenment. Unlike Paul Gilroy's use of racial difference to reconcemptualize the liberal humanist inheritance, Bellow's construction of racial difference operates to rectify a positive notion of the Enlightenment as central to assimilated (white) America. This belief is consonant with a philosophical affiliation with liberal humanism, despite the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, as a response to the politically divided America of the Civil Rights period and after. For Bellow, revolutions have freed us to contemplate our "spiritual freedom." The slave past is disavowed. This allows Bellow to view all such troubling "historic" forms, even the unique horror of the holocaust, as closeable episodes of this past and therefore not disabling. Englightnement notions of the self and modernity. Bellow more often names Blackness to distance it from American identity rather than to work it as a constitutive absence. It is massified, criminalized, and contained in the ghetto to serve as a passive example of modern alienation. However, the more Bellow attempts to extricate the "historic" from the "spiritual," the more they are shown to be inextricable, especially during an accentuated period of racialized U.S. politics from the 1950s through the 1970s.

• Solomon, Barbara Probst. "The Spanish Journey of Saul Bellow's Fiction." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 94–99.
  

  Argues that instead of turning to the static serenities of the English novel, American writers went to Proust, Stendahl, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Tolstoy. Argues that like Hemingway, Bellow also found inspiration in the Iberian peninsular. Bellow, of all the contemporary writers, has had the greatest affinity for that fluid mixed, semi-concealed world on the run, given the number of times Bellow will suddenly insert a scene set in Spain into the novels. Not until Bellow published AAM in 1953 did the voice in the American novel change. In this novel Bellow was "off to the races" with Don Quixote in his hip pocket. It is a book with fluid, layered narratives made up of many cultures and many non-Anglo-Saxon linguistic reverberations. Concludes that Bellow is indeed a multicultural novelist.

• Solotaroff, Theodore. "Philip Roth and the Jewish Moralists." Chicago Review 13.4 (1959): 87–99. Cited in Abstracts of English Studies, 1961.
  

  Compares Roth's style with that of Bellow and other Jewish writers.

• Staples, Brent. "Mr. Bellow's Planet. 'Parallel Time': Growing up Black and White." New York: Pantheon, 1994. 191–242. Excerpt rpt. as "Into the White Ivory Tower." New York Times Magazine 6 Feb. 1994: 24–26, 36, 44, 47, 54, 60.
  

  "Into the White Ivory Tower": Contains staples's recollections of stalking Bellow on Dorchester Avenue for several months before he actually sighted him. Gives a vivid, unflattering portrait of Bellow's facial features and manner of walking and scanning the crowd ahead of him. "Parallel Time" contains Staples's anecdotal recollection of the first appearance of Humboldt's Gift in a Chicago bookstore; his acquaintance with sociologist Edward Shils who appears in the novel as Professor Richard Durnwald; Bellow's use of sexual body parts in characterization; the questionable depiction of the black pickpocket; and Ricardo Cantabile's references to blacks as "crazy buffaloes" and pork chops. Concludes with the comment that Bellow had taught him that to construct a book is to steal souls, to kidnap them into the pages, to stir in stories either from the papers or your life, and violá!—you have a novel.

• Steinke, Russell. "The Monologic Temper of Bellow's Fiction." Junction [Brooklyn College] 1.3 (1973): 178–84.
  
  
• Stern, Richard. "Bellow in Five Hundred Words or Less." The Invention of the Real. Richard Stern. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1982. 25–26.Rpt. in Saul Bellow: The Man and His Work. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Dehli: B.R. Publ., 2000. 577–78.
  

  Argues that the Bellow man is not so much en route as arriving in a place whose maps don't correspond with what he sees and thinks. The hero is an emotional sucker who requires enchantment and doesn't know that he supplies most of it himself. He's usually taken for a ride, but at the end is himself and full of resonant stillness. He fights windmills which do not look like giants, but like philosophers and wives. Even when the landscape looks gloomy, filthy and stony, the Bellow hero is as susceptible to the glory of industrial smog as an English poet to a Venetian sunset. The world's beauty, he realizes and outlasts con men, old pals, old streets, beautiful women, radiant ideas. Concludes that the hero's memory becomes an inner cosmos with a divine flipside.

• Stern, Richard. Bellow's Moving Day." The Invention of the Real. Richard Stern., Athens, GA: U of Georgie P, 1982. 13–24. Rpt. in One Person and Another: On Writers and Writing. Richard Stern. Dallas: New York: Baskerville, 1993. 13–21; Saul Bellow: The Man and His Work. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Dehli: B.R. Publ., 2000. 31–42.
  

  "Bellow's Moving Day" is Stern's elegantly written account of the October day on which the moving trucks arrived and packed Bellow's belongings for the move to Chicago. A literary and biographical tribute to Bellow.

• Stevenson, David L. "The Activists." Daedalus 92.2 (1963): 238–49.
  

  Stevenson sees postwar fiction as primarily occupied with the "active self-consciousness of characters full of high energy who are intellectual immigrants from the norms of domestic morality and ambition in a close money-making society.'' The central characters are all "ontologists" or "avid investigators" into the essential qualities of the events and the human relationships that chance their way. All remain intrepid opportunists of the self." Sees Bellow's novels in this context.

• Stock, Irvin. "The Novels of Saul Bellow." Southern Review 3.1 (1967): 13–42. Rpt. in Fiction as Wisdom: From Goethe to Bellow. Irvin Stock. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1980. 190–224.
  

  A critical tribute to Saul Bellow which focuses on Blakean and Wordworthean affirmations in the Bellow novel. Discursive and thorough.

• Stora-Sandor, Judith. "The Stylistic Metamorphosis of Jewish Humor." Humor 4.2 (1991): 211–22.
  

  Comments on the most striking stylisitic characteristics of Jewish literature by such writers as Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Zangwill, Bellow, Malamud, Singer, and others. Identifies the influence of traditional Judaism, the Bible, and the Talmud, all with their manifestations of antithetic thought, semantically stylistic ruptures, questions, repetitions, oscillations, chiasmus and sacred-exegetical habits of thought, including distinctive humor.

• Sullivan, Andrew. ?Longing.? New Republic 17 Apr. 2000: 12.
  

  Describes R as an accurate rumination on Bloom?s life which enacts an honest distance between Bellow and Bloom that only friendship can bequeath. Describes the core of Bloom?s philosophy about eros, the essence of living and Platonic philosophy, reverence for the erotic life, and the primacy of individual love. Argues that the abyss moved Bloom toward love and political conservativism. Considers Bloom?s finest achievement to be his ability to write about human love from the perspective of a homosexual and to do so openly. Concludes that, in Bellow?s reality, Bloom had a gift for reading the reality and putting a loving face to it. Concludes that Bloom needed to witness the love of one man for another.

• Sullivan, Victoria. "The Battle of the Sexes in Three Bellow Novels." Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975. 101–14.
  

  Argues that Bellow is not a sexist if one considers his unflattering portraits of men. "The women in his novels are like the men, a sad, crazy, mixed-up lot. They tend to fall into two basic categories: the victims and the victimizers, the latter tending to be more colorful. If they appear less three-dimensional than the men, and if they are certainly less sensitive than Doris Lessing's heroines, this is the natural consequence of novels in which the protagonist tends to be a middle-aged Jewish male with a world view to match his ethnic bias." Concludes that Bellow's great talent is in chronicling the painful consequences of human behavior, ethnic identity, gender relations, and cultural frustration, male as well as female.

• Swindell, Larry. "Bookshelf: Saul Bellow Has Given Us Far More than One 'Gift.'" Fort Worth Star-Telegram 24 Mar. 1996: 6.
  
  
• Symons, Julian. "Bellow Before Herzog." Critical Occasions. London: Hamilton, 1966. 112–18.
  

  Provides a general overview of the early novels, placing Bellow squarely within the "great tradition" of the Anglo-American novel. Commends Bellow for his extraordinary skill, "demotic" language, and seriousness.

• Radeljkovic, Zvonimir. "Bellow's Search for Meaning." Yugoslav Perspectives on American Literatue: An Anthology. Ed. James L. Thorson. Trans. Pavlinka Georgiev. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980. 181–84.
  

  A general survey of Bellow's fiction and themes. Identifies Bellow as spurning discussion of social defeats and victories and as concentrating instead on human individuality in relation to society.

• Rans, Geoffrey. "The Novels of Saul Bellow." Review of English Literature 4.4 (1963): 18–30.
  

  A generalized, chronological reading of the novels through to HRK.

• Raper, Julius Rowan. "The Limits of Change: Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King." Narcissus from Rubble: Competing Models of Character in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1992. 12–36.
  

  Argues that SD and HRK approach the subject of personal change in their respective protagonists from a perspective both complex and bivalent. Tommy Wilhelm needs desperately to change but has already attempted all the protean variations he can imagine and has no further inner resources to fall back upon. Henderson is hardly as desperate as Tommy, but he too needs transformation. Although both novels dramatize characters who vary the objects on which they focus, the books finally do not propose that contemporary man can develop by simply changing the objects that interest him. The two fictions direct attention instead toward the resources the characters have within themselves to enable them to oppose the abstractly objective forces working against the individual in cultures as different as New York and tribal Africa. Both novels, like the body of Bellow's work, challenge that predilection of modernism championing abstraction and objectivity, rather than empathy and subjectivity. Concludes that both characters achieve the healing and reunification of self, bringing together conscious and unconscious halves of their beings into a whole. Draws on Jungian and other individuation theory, including archetypal and myth criticism.

• Raymer, John. "A Changing Sense of Chicago in the Works of Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren." Old Northwest 4.4 (1978): 371–83.
  
  
• Reif, Rita. "Bellow Papers Bring a Record at Auction." New York Times 8 June 1988: C38.
  

  Reports on Sotheby's sale of 16 MSP typescripts, galleys, and manuscripts for a record $66,000. Reports also that the manuscripts have gone to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library as an anonymous gift.

• Renaux, Sigrid. "The Hero's Last Ordeal." American Studies International 35.1 (1997): 44–49.
  

  Discusses the carnivalesque performances within HRK which are used to test philosophical ideas. Henderson's last test is preceded by several carnivalistic performances which imbue every situation with carnival's jolly relativity, and which break the monological seriousness of his quest for the truth. Concludes that ultimately Bellow allows us a glimpse of the forces at work in the center of this novel, making us meditate on the world and on ourselves through the lens of a carnivalistic vision.

• Renaux, Sigrid. "Saul Bellow nos Anos 80—uma Reavaliacao." Revista Letras 38 (1989): 167–75. Narrative American Society [In Portugese.]
  
  
• Rice, Alan. "'What Do We Say to Each Other When the Library Is Closed?' African Presences in the Writings of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 3–25.
  

  All contributors to this special issue of the Saul Bellow Journal address what Toni Morrison has called the "dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence." These presences are at the heart of many of Bellow's novels and short stories and often provide a key to their unraveling, even when they are apparently absent. Notes Bellow's haughty disdain within his own literary landscape in Chicago, and points up his depictions of Chicago as a city where white Americans are in danger from the disaffected black ghetto population. Notes Bellow's neo-conservativism, comments on the racial views of Dean Corde, which closely parallel Bellow's view. Suggests that both are unable or unwilling to see a dynamic and workable culture created by the ghetto poor. Discusses how Bellow's depictions of the Africans and African Americans are elided, and presented as stereotypes. Describes that outrageous stereotypes and a subtlely racist depictions of the Haitian robber in AT. Using a frontier urban myth of black wildness Bellow's fictions employ throw-away lines that suggest gaudily dressed ghettoize victims interested only in libidinous pleasures. Deriving from minstrelsy and black face mimicry, the black presence in these novels is reduced to a negative presence depicted by a voyeuristic gaze. Comments on MSP in particular, pointing out the cinematic visual mode employed in the fiction. The black male body stands for Sammler's repressed desires and participate in a white male libidinal voyeurism. His account of exoticized, eroticized blackness plays to a voyeuristic white readership. Summarizes the various approaches based on whiteness studies taken by the numerous contributors to this SBJ issue. Details post-sixties immigrant race relations with black Americans as a souring process. Discusses Bellow's assimilated possitionality as he explicitly promotes an anti-multiculturalist agenda in the 1980s. Argues that Bellow too often uses the lenses of the Eurocentric critic whose universalist agenda forecloses an imaginative and critical praxis which moves beyond familiar standards. Provides commentary from a variety of writers and commentators on both sides of the racial divide and of the multi-cultural debate in order to locate Bellow in his moment and milieu. Concludes that, in all these essays, the black figure in American literature cannot be easily dismissed as the black worker in post-industrial capitalism. Such figures are central to Bellow's fiction and their insistent voices and signal presence continue long after the library is closed. They impact Bellow's fiction in a crucially determining way.

• Riese, Utz. "Saul Bellow: Das 19. Jahrhundert als Wertmaß?stab." Zwischen Verinnerlichung und Protest: McCullers, Salinger, Malamud, Bellow, Capote. Englische Sprach- und Literaturswissenschaft 52. Berlin: Akademie, 1982. 198–249.
  
  
• Rodgers, Bernard. "Bellow's Gift." World and I Aug. 2000: 219–28.
  

  Calls R another one of Bellow's raids on the inarticulate to capture what he sees as the essentials of life and the human experience. Talks at length on Bellow's long, prolific, and socially aware career. Concludes that it is a great gift to us all that he is still creating memorable characters at the age of 85.

• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Beyond All Philosophies." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 97–110. Rpt. in "Beyond All Philosophies: The Dynamic Vision of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. Ed. Eugene Hollahan. Georgia State Literary Studies 12. New York: AMS, 1996. 161–76.
  

  Argues that the Bellow hero inevitably reaches beyond all the formulations of Western philosophy for a dynamic vision of love and brotherhood characterized by the search for psychic unity and a "truly human condition." Passing beyond the formulations of other thinkers, the Bellow protagonist finally accepts the mystery of life.

• Rosenberg, Chris. "Mailer's Brothers 'The Counterlife' of Violence in Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth." Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture. Warren Rosenberg. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 2001. 153–206.
  

  Describes Bellow's protagonist in DM and Asa Levanthal as enraged victims caught between the effeminacies of shtetl Jewish male codings, and the male dominant codings of American society at large. Hence the intersection of gender and violence in Bellow's fictional world. A detailed examination which concludes that Bellow's fiction can be seen as a reflection of the Jewish male's struggle to achieve a masculine self that can balance the intense demands made upon it. Concludes that Bellow intends his readers to experience through his characters the powerful psychic disruptions involved in the process of forming a coherent self within a multicultural society.

• Rosenberg, Ruth. "Contemporising Kabbalah: Saul Bellow Confirms Cosmic Connection." Journal of Reform Judaism 27 (Spring 1980): 40–54.
  

  Bellow celebrates his medievalism and provides a renewed Kabbalistic mythological world view in order to restore to the Jew a sense of the transcendent sacredness of life. Examines the concept of lbbur (impregnation of another soul into a man) developed in the thirteenth century, and the related concept of restitution. Examines HG as establishing the conditions for the initiation and termination of lbbur. Discusses also concepts such as the counterpart soul and the inner voice, and the phenomenon of the Maggid or itinerant preacher who, impregnated with the voice of an angel, can speak inspired utterances. Many of these medieval Jewish mystical concepts are applied to HG and more particularly, to Charlie Citrine.

• Rosenfeld, Alvin H. "Saul Bellow, On the Soul." Midstream 23.10 (1977): 47–59.
  

  Discusses the broad issue of truth and the matters of the religious sensibility within the Bellow canon. Suggests that Bellow disguises them beneath a "spoofing humor" and pursues them more vigorously with each new novel.

• Rosenthal, Regine. "Identit ebraica nei romanzi tedesci ed americani." Trans. Allessandra Calanchi. Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraic-america. Ed. Guido Fink and Gabriella Morisco. Bussola 9. Bologna: CLUEB, 1990. Papers presented at the Convegno "Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraica," Centro studi sorelle Clarke di Begni di Lucca, June 1988.
  
  
• Rosenthal, Regine. "Memory and the Holocaust: Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Bellarosa Connection." Saul Bellow at Seventy- five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 81–92.
  

  Discusses MSP and BC as novels in which the respective protagonists are Jewish intellectuals for whom memory plays a crucial role not so much for its redeeming and supportive qualities, as for as its darker more haunting aspect. Shows how Mr. Sammler's memories play a key role in Sammler's perception of himself and the world around him, as do those of the unnamed narrator of BC. Here Bellow seems interested in the role memory plays in the New World, and on Jews who were not immediately exposed to the atrocities committed in Europe. Notes that while Mr. Sammler learns to turn his experience into one that adds to his own humanity, the significance of memory in BC has changed: under the influence of the New World, the life-giving force has been replaced by an escape from memory, by a refusal to lead a humanly meaningful life. Both Billy Rose and the narrator are considered deficient in this respect. Concludes that in Bellow's most recent novella, the refusal to accept the obligations of memory constitutes a decision against a humanly meaningful life.

• Ross, Theodore J. "Notes on Saul Bellow." Chicago Jewish Forum 18 (1959): 21–27.
  

  Accuses Bellow of attempting to Christianize the Jewish experience in his novels for the sake of transmuting that unique context into "something vaguely acceptable to everybody under the sun."

• Rossani, Wolfgang. "II Nobel a Bellow" [The Nobel Prize to Saul Bellow]." Osservatore Politico Letterario 22.11 (1976): 85–88.
  
  
• Roston, Murray. 'The Flight of Jonah: A Study of Roth, Bellow and Malamud." Asian Response to American Literature. Ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah. New York: Barnes, 1972. 304–12.
  

  Talks generally about the Israeli students of literature looking with interest at American literature dealing with Jewish alienation and assimilation. Discusses H and several other Bellow protagonists from this perspective.

• Roth, Henry. "Segments." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PAl 5.1 (1979): 58–62. Rpt. as Shifting Landscapes. Ed. mario Materassi. Philadelphia: Jewish Pub. Soc., 1987. 231–37.
  
  
• Roth, Philip. "Re-Reading Saul Bellow." New Yorker 9 Oct. 2000: 82–90. Rpt. in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Phillip Roth. Boston: Houghton, 2001. 139–60.
  

  Discusses the various transformations of Bellow as he moved from DM and TV, AAM and subsequent works. Praises the superabundance, and the brilliant subversions of the form of novel. Rejoices in the narcissistic enthusiasm for life in all its hybrid forms. Comments also on Bellow's overwhelmingly ambitious protagonists who didn't get stamped out in life's struggle. Calls his prose effervescent, liberty-taking, dynamic, permeated by mind, and connected to the mysteries of feeling. Discusses each of the novels in turn, commenting particularly on Bellow's increasingly gloomy and apocalyptic depictions of Chicago. A major article.

• Rothermel, Wolfgang P. "Saul Bellow." Amerikanische Literatur der Gegenwart. Ed. Martin Christadler. Stuttgart: Kroner, 1973. 69–104.
  

  The first Bellow survey in German, intended as an introduction to a general readership. Working simultaneously on two levels, the chronological and systematic, Rothermel illustrates the development, refinement and variations of Bellow's themes, specifying as more prominent Bellow's commitment to the intellectual in an anti-intellectual (urban) world, and his position among modern Jewish–American writers. Also touches upon the largely autobiographical nature of Bellow's novels, and comments on the seeming discrepancies between his fictional and non-fictional writings.

• Rovit, Earl. "Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer: The Secret Sharers." Saul Bellow.' A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975. 161–70.
  

  Claims that the 1960's in American literature has been dominated by two radically differing counterclaims in the works of both Bellow and Mailer. Notes first some areas of confluence between the two writers, and then proceeds to discuss the radical differences. Compares their respective treatments of such issues as: Jewishness, women, politics, time, history, evil, and the purposes of art.

• Rovit, Earl. "Saul Bellow and the Concept of the Survivor." Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Cen-truum voor Taal-en Literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. 89–101. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.), 10–11 Dec. 1977. Rpt. as Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 115–28.
  

  Discusses Hemingway's "negative fatherhood" to Bellow in his projection of an artist as one who could survive only in death. Points out the combination of Christian sacrifice and Faustian enterprise in the protagonists of both authors. Argues that Bellow is reluctant to accept either model. Many of his protagonists learn the ineffectuality of both modes and finally avoid either model by engaging in incessant motion. Accepting their limitations, they determine to "act well." Like the wandering Jew archetype, the Bellow hero is doomed to eternal loneliness and eternal movement emblematic of man's "naked consciousness." Death is neither mastered nor accepted. It simply becomes a destination.

• Rozenberg-Zoltowska, Helene. "A propos du 'Roi Rumkowski': Note sur l'icriture majoritaire de Bellow." Caliban 25 (1988): 111–17.
  
  
• Rubin, Louis D. "Southerners and Jews." Southern Review 2.3 (1966): 697–713. Rpt. as "The Experienceof Difference: Southerners and Jews." The Curious Death of the Novel: Essays in American Literature. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 1967.
  

  Compares some of the novels of the Southern literary regional genre with some novels considered part of the renaissance in Jewish–American literature. The rationale for comparing both groups seems to be that both are ancestor-conscious, strong on familial ties, and not yet thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of American life. Discusses H in this comparative context.

• Rupp, Richard H. "Saul Bellow: Belonging to the World in General." Celebration in Postwar American Fiction.' 1945–1967. Richard H. Rupp. Coral Gables, FL: U of Miami P, 1970. 189–208.
  

  Concentrates mainly on the affirmations found in the Bellow novel, their humanity and their endlessly varied reflections of a distinctly American reality. Concludes that for Bellow, "engagement is intermittent, expressed largely in secular celebrations. The quality of life and its very reality rest upon the quality of those celebrations."

• Ustvedt, Yngvar. "Saul Bellow—en amerikansk natidsdikter." Samtiden 80 (1971): 273–82. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1971.
  
  

• Takizawa, Juzo. "Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Bellow's Work." American Literature in the 1950's: Annual Report 1976. Tokyo: Tokyo Chapter of the American Literature Society of Japan, 1977. 50–59.
  

  Discusses the importance of the weltanshauung of these two writers in studying Bellow's fiction, and of the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Bellow's works.

• Tanner, Tony. Afterword. Saul Bellow and His Work. Ed. Edmond Schraepen. Brussels: Centrum voor Taal-en Litera-tuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1978. 131–38. Proceedings of a symposium held at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.), 10–11 Dec. 1977.
  

  Provides a summary statement of the proceedings of a conference held in 1977 at the Free University of Brussels. The general opinions stated in this essay appear in much amplified form in Tanner's 1979 book on Bellow.

• Tanner, Tony. "The American Novelist as Entropologist." London Magazine ns 10.7 (1970): 5–18.
  
  
• Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1850–1970. New York: Harper, 1971. 64–84, 295–321.
  
  
• Tanner, Tony. "Saul Bellow: The Flight from Monologue." Encounter [London] 24.2 (1965): 58–65, 67–70. Rpt. in Herzog: Text and Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Viking, 1976. 445–65.
  

  Traces the phenomenon of monologue in the Bellow novels through a chronological treatment of each protagonist. Concludes that in the ending lies the evidence that each of these characters finally flees from self and monologue into community and communion.

• Teodorescu, Anda. "Saul Bellow: An Ironical Humanist." Cahiers Roumains d'Etudes Litteraires 4 (1979): 107–12.
  

  Bellow heroes are disillusioned failures significant primarily because of the wide range of feelings they are capable of. They are introspective versions of the code hero with whom they share loneliness, uncertainty, striving for moral dignity, a sense of irony and an understanding of the futility of their efforts. Bellow's humanism implies freedom through an act of comprehension. Therefore, the protagonists can be great without having to be heroic. After examining each novel, Teodorescu concludes that Bellow's is an ironical optimism, "an ambiguous solution involving art and nature, man and the universe."

• Tijeras, Eduardo. "Saul Bellow." Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos [Madrid] 317 (1976): 425–28. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1977.
  
  
• Trachtenberg, Stanley. "Saul Bellow's Luftmenschen: The Compromise with Reality." Critique 9.3 (1967): 37–61.
  

  Describes in detail the characteristics of the Bellow hero that qualify him for the title Luftmensch. Treats each of the novels to date and concludes that it is the conflict with reality and uncertainty that determines the final compromise with reality achieved by the luftmenschen in the novels that provides them with their distinctive character. Illustrates how very useful a model this is for conveying a contemporary vision of the indeterminacy of the self and the outlines of existence in twentieth-century America. A major article.

• Trachtenberg, Stanley. "Saul Bellow and the Veil of Maya." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 39–57.
  

  Establishes Schopenhauer's original use of this term and traces its philosophical use and adaptation in H and other works. Concludes that "Struggling to maintain it [freedom of will] among the illusory veils of intellect, imagination, as well as those distractions of society and powers of nature, Bellow, throughout his fiction, remains pessimistic about what seems certain to be a losing battle."

• Tripathy, Biyot Kesh. "A Door in the Sky: Terminal Configurations." Osiris N.: The Victim and the American Novel. Amsterdam: Gruner, 1985. 227–56.
  
  
• Tripathy, Biyot K. "End-Game: Terminal Configurations in Bellow's Novels." Modern Fiction Studies 33.2 (1987): 215–31.
  

  Argues that in each of Bellow's novels "a last short journey to the terminal position is of great importance and is worked out with care and deliberation by the author. The journey is invariably in a changed direction . . . and is often reinforced by a reductive sense which is more acutely presented as a sense of withdrawal from a wider world to an enclosed space, internal or external, that becomes claustrophobic—as if there is shrinkage of the enclosure. Often a last, dark journey is made, at the end of which is a confrontation with death" (216). Works this thesis with reference to most of the novels.

• take root. Outlines events taking place in 1960 popular culture and Mr. Sammler's contrasting sobriety. States that the narrative becomes confusing when the perceptions of the New Left are piled together with the other insanities of the sixties, mostly the inherited horror and the legacy of the Holocaust. Asks what happens when these New Left views of Bellow are contextualized along with commonly agreed responses to the American Scene and the recent massacres in the gas chambers. Argues that Bellow's sixties critique of radical youth gets submerged in the over-all critique of Western decadence. Concludes that novels like MSP
  
  

• Wade, Stephen. "Jewish American Themes in Ficiton I: Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Identity Crisis." Jewish American Literature Since 1945: An Introduction. Stephen Wade. Chicago: Titzroy Dearborn, 1999. 52–72.
  

  Talks of mid-century Jewish American social and intellectual life, its didactic tendency, Russian overtones, anti-semitism, basic morality, the dialogues of Talmudic debate, the question of how a good man should live, Yiddishkeit, the critique of WASP culture, the value of intellectual life, the Holocaust, and moral figures of contemporary American life. Reviews a variety of novels.

• Wade, Stephen. "Relocating Moralism in Jewish America: Saul Bellow." Jewish American Literature Since 1945: An Introduction. Stephen Wade. Chicago: Titzroy Dearborn, 1999. 154–66.
  

  Notes that Bellow's principal themes have been philosphic commentary on Modernism, the nature of the assimilated Jew, Jews in the city, Jewish intellectualism, neurotic protagonists, and "the old system" of Jewish familial piety. Comments on each of the major novels with regard to their commentary on human enigmas, European Enlightenment ideals, bourgeois habits, the thickness of community, the American diaspora, and the possibility for redemption.

• Walden, Daniel. "Abraham Cahan and Saul Bellow: Two Views of 'The Machine in the Ghetto.' "Ethnic Forum 3.1–2 (1983): 66–78.
  

  Uses the familiar trope of the machine in the garden, or the influence of urbanism and technology in Jewish–American literature. Places Abraham Cahan and Saul Bellow alongside one another in order to show how each fits into this rubric. Traces how in book after book, Bellow's characters have sought order in the midst of a technological society that produces chaos. Documents many of Bellow's essays and lectures on this topic of the urban problem and its diminishment of the artist. Concludes by asserting Bellow's position as the one to sound the call to human beings to resist depersonalization, and to concern oneself primarily with one's own humanization.

• Walden, Daniel. "Bellow, Malamud and Roth: Part of the Continuum." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PAl 5.2 (1979): 5–7. Joint issue with Yiddish 4.1 (1979).
  

  Defends the tradition of Jewish–American literature. Provides a brief historical survey of the genre and suggests that Bellow and Malamud might be the mid-point of the continuum rather than the end of it.

• Walden, Daniel. "The Resonance of Twoness: The Urban Vision of Saul Bellow." Studies in American Jewish Literature [University Park, PAl 4.2 (1978): 9–21. Joint issue with Yiddish 3.3 (1978). Rpt. in Saul Bellow: The Man and His Work. Eds. M. A. Quayam and Sukhbir Singh. New Dehli: B. R. Pub., 200. 133–50.
  

  In this essay Walden examines Saul Bellow's solution to the twin problems of the alienation of the artist from popular American culture, and his avoidance of the "art" novel which is equally removed from reality, sterile and negative. Argues that Bellow's specific dilemma is that in urban society "too much autonomy and too much individualism involve loss of world, but too little leads to loss of self."

• Walden, Daniel. "Saul Bellow's American Dream: Technology, the Artist, and the Machine in the Ghetto." Bulletin of Science Technology & Society 7.4 (1987): 469–75.
  

  Argues that as a child of orthodox Jewish immigrants, and a young American immersed in the experience of urban America, Bellow experienced the enormous expectations placed upon him to be "American," and realize the American Dream. However, it is a dream which must be realized in a chaotic technological and information society which provides rough treatment for intellectuals of Bellow's humanistic and spiritual bent. Details this expectation and conflict through the protagonists of each of the novels.

• Walden, Daniel. "Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Cynthia Ozick: Dealing with Existentialism, Evolving Moral Essentialism." Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. Eds. Dorothea Fischer Hornung and Raphael Hernandez Heike. Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. 275–87.
  

  Describes the anti-modernist tendencies of Bellow, Malamud, and Ozick and their obsession with the moral affects of secularization, the essentially moral formations of the human psyche, and the maintaining of the ethical perspectives.

• Walden, Daniel. "Saul Bellow's Paradox: Individualism and the Soul." Saul Bellow Journal 12.2 (1994): 59–71.
  

  Argues that living with tension and unresolved conflict is a constant in Bellow's fiction, given his ambivalence toward traditional Jewish life, Americanization, and assimilation. What Bellow seeks is recovery through realizing that life can proceed only by reviewing itself and by acknowledging that this process is continual and necessary to the discovery of an inner self. This is what most of Bellow's characters realize, particularly the later ones who advocate integration and fusion of the opposite laws of individualism, community, and society. The art of Bellow's fiction has always been the mirroring of the conflicts between faith and reason, affirmation and "objective' truth. Bellow's paradoxes are purposeful, of his own making, and never to be resolved since these are the polar tensions which make up life.

• Walden, Daniel. "Toward Order and Pattern in Urban Society: Bellow's Journey from the Existentialists to Communicated Experience." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 27–34.
  

  Discusses Bellow's upbringing in the slums of Lachine and Montreal, his family of childhood, his attitude toward being Jewish, the transition to Chicago and the parallel inner journey from the existential disorder of his cultural perception to an assertion and reaffirmation of human values. Talks of Bellow's hypotheses about an inner voice—in terms of Kavanah and then of Mitzuah—of redemption, of knowledge and experience, of turning toward an ultimate source of clarity and meaning and doing a good deed which expresses God's will. Describes also Bellow's attitudes toward the relationship of art and human love, creating texts and living life. Reviews these connections in several of the novels and through a variety of protagonists. Concludes that when Bellow has no answer to the problems he writes about, he does have recommendations: communicate, feel, act as a human being, interact with other human beings, and believe in these things as your high calling.

• Walden, Daniel. "Urbanism and the Artist: Saul Bellow and the Age of Technology." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 1–14.
  

  This article begins with the assertion that for many years Bellow has been evolving a rationale for the struggle between old art and new technology, and for the issue of urbanism and art. Explores the entire issue of technology and its impact not only upon the artist, but also upon the protagonist-intellectuals of Bellow's novels. Correlates the relevant statements from Bellow's essays with reference to individual works of fiction. Concludes that, in spite of the claims of technology and art, they are "saviors." Art, according to Bellow, attempts to find in the universe that which is enduring, fundamental and essential. The center has not been preempted by technology or urbanism.

• Walden, Daniel. "Urbanism, Technology and the Ghetto in the Novels of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth and Saul Bellow." American Jewish History 73.3 (1984): 296–306.
  

  Similar to his "Urbanism and the Artist: Saul Bellow and the Age of Technology" (see item 547).

• Waterman, Andrew. "Saul Bellow's Ineffectual Angels." On the Novel: A Present for Walter Allen on His 60lh Birthday from His Friends and Colleagues. Ed. B. S. Benedikz. London: Dent, 1971. 218–39.
  

  Discusses, with relation to several of the novels, how Bellow resolves the issue of meliorism through art. Concludes that only in MSP does Bellow provide an example of the really good man, but that goodness is ineffectual in this character as in all the others.

• Weinberg, Helen. "Kafka and Bellow: Comparisons and Further Definitions." The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970. 29–107.
  

  Traces evidences of direct and indirect influences of Kafka upon Bellow. Also traces the possible influence of Buber's thinking, via Kafka, upon the development of the post-victim era hero. Examines all of the novels up to H from this perspective, making comparisons and drawing connections between Bellow and Kafka.

• Weinstein, Mark. "Bellow's Endings." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 87–95.
  

  Argues that the endings of Bellow's novels are sometimes dramatic, sometimes lyrical, and always memorable, reverberating in the imagination long after the novel is finished. It sums up and suggests there is a logic, a unified design, a definitive meaning in all that occurred. But the nature of that meaning may remain enigmatic. Bellow's endings are usually comic, even though death is nearly always a heavy presence. They involve comedy and tragedy, affirmation and death in a tension that represents the mixed condition of the Bellovian world. Reviews the endings of several of the novels. Concludes that to really do justice to the topic of Bellow's endings one would have to point out their remarkable differences among his individual novels. They present the same elements in ever-shifting configurations, offer a revealing commentary upon each other and, ultimately, suggest that all of Bellow's major novels are comedies about death.

• Weinstein, Mark. "Bellow's Imagination-Instructors." Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 19–22.
  

  Argues that the most prominent instructors in the novels—Tamkin, Dahfu and Humboldt—are Blakeans who emphasize seeing because they believe that imaginative vision creates reality. Movement comes from the inside out, but the protagonists never fully trust these imagination-instructors because, though they feel their visions, they cannot dismiss external reality. However, these imagination-instructors do provide a balance considering the number of them around. They do address deep emotional and imaginative needs, and assert the nobility of the individual and the possibility of change. The Bellovian protagonist learns that real life is a relationship between here and now.

• Whitman, Alden. "For Bellow, Novel is a Mirror of Society." New York Times Nov. 25, 1975. 44.
  

  Contains much reported commentary from Bellow complaining that critics keep categorizing great public writers according to their ethnic origins, thus giving jews and blacks a ghetto description of themselves. Furthermore, according to Bellow, the role of social-protest writing of earlier years has been taken over by crusading media and journalists. Claims that HG is an attempt to hold up a mirror to urban society to show its noise, its uncertitudes, its sense of crisis and despair, and its standardization of pleasures.

• Whitman, Ruth. "Cutting the Jewish Bride's Hair." Images of Women in Literature. Ed. Mary Ann Ferguson. New York: 1973. 81.
  
  
• Widmer, Kingsley. "Poetic Naturalism in the Contemporary Novel." Partisan Review 26 (1959): 467–72.
  

  Poetic naturalism and symbolic tendentiousness, often characterize first novels. DM is written in a dry, transparent social realist language, with its themes drived from urban sociology and marginal man theory. TV's narrative realism is undershot with Kafkaesque allegorical ambiguities. AAM shows a marked absence of realistic narrative for a variation on picaresque sociology submerged in symbolism. The style has a rotund elaborateness and an uncomfortable number of adjectives and metaphors. Bellow's movement into a poeticization of an essentially scoial point of view covers about a decade.

• Wieting, Molly Stark. "The Function of the Trickster in Saul Bellow's Novels." Saul Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 23–31.
  

  Discusses the dual nature of the helper-trickster reality instructor in the Bellow novel. Concentrates primarily on Dahfu and Tamkin in developing this thesis. Concludes that each generation must discover and reinterpret the trickster anew, as Bellow has done for this generation.

• Wieting, Molly Stark. "The Symbolic Function of the Pastoral in Saul Bellow's Novels." Southern Quarterly 16 (1978): 359–74.
  

  Argues that while most critics focus on the Jewish, urban milieu of the Bellow novel, they have missed a corresponding pastoral element, "an excursion, either physical or mental, to an environment that is free from the clutter and chaos of the protagonists' urban existence." They create a pervasive pattern that forms a cohesive motif in Bellow's fiction. This pastoral motif signals the possibility of spiritual renewal.

• Wisse, Ruth R. "Bellow's Gift—A Memoir." Commentary Dec. 2001: 43–53.
  

  "[D]iscusses meeting Saul Bellow and how he helped her find the true story of her birth in Romania in 1936. Describes how she and Bellow share a concern for the Jewish people and the young nation of Israel, and that they and their families enjoy a special friendship." (Commentary abstract)

• Wisse, Ruth R. "The New York (Jewish) Intellectuals." Commentary Nov. 1987: 28–38.
  

  Describes the composition and background of the three distinct groups of Jewish–American intellectuals of New York. Briefly discusses Saul Bellow as a member of the second generation. Argues that these people were not primarily academic scholars, "applying disciplined method to investigation of a given body of material .... They were a literate street gang, using whatever tactics they had at hand in defense of their shifting territory" (29). Takes several critics and historians to task for the ways in which she believes they have misrepresented this group, and deals with several of the thinkers, including Bellow, and their writings.

• Wisse, Ruth R. "The Schlemiel as Liberal Humanist." The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Ruth R. Wisse. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. 91–107. [Paperback ed. 1980.] Rpt. in Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975. 90–100.
  

  Discusses the Bellow hero as a representative modern schlemiel. Deals primarily with H. Discusses a variety of aspects including humor, fate, the Jewish son, the family psychodynamics, his complacency, and witness of horrors.

• Wisse, Ruth R. "Writing Beyond Alienation: Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth." The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture. New York: Free Press, 2000. 295–322.
  

  Comments that Bellow's fiction has reinvigorated America through his boyish, urban, male characters who seem never to want to succumb to life's demands if it entails a loss of freedom. Provides a detailed discussion of AAM, MSP, and H. Concludes that for all the celebration of the animal ridens, Bellow's final lesson is contained in Mr Sammler's final awakening to his human contract and to his near impotence. His awful knowledge cannot be put to use because he has no access to power.

• Wolkoff, Robert L. "Bellow's Command of Words, Ideas Makes Essays 'delicious.'" Metro West Jewish News 49.19 (1995): 42–45.
  

  Provides a brief review of IAAU, commending Bellow for inventing a new kind of American sentence, and for being an everyman who describes what we have all seen and felt. Concludes that one would be hard pressed to find better evidence of the image of the immigrant love affair with America than this book.

• Wood, James. ?The World?s Mystic Late Bloom.? Guardian 15 Apr. 2000: 6?7.
  

  Calls R an astonishing, substantial new novel full of the old cascading power and august raciness, a book literally darting with metaphor and wit. Sees it as memorializing the larger intellectual community at the University of Chicago, and staging snapshot portraits of variety of local luminaries. Discusses how R belies Bellow?s professed fatalism with its great energy reminiscent of the late works of Tolstoy and Mann. Comments that Ravelstein simply joins the room of large, Bellovian comic characters like Moses Herzog, Tommy Wilhelm, and Uncle Benn Crader. Compares Ravelstein to a Dickensian creation of Proust?s Charlus, the brilliant and snobbish homosexual who loudly lectures Marcel as they walk the Parisian boulevards. Discusses at length Bellow and Bloom?s political agreement that American in its materialism, violence, and shallowness embodied nihilism without the abyss. Concludes by reminiscing about Bellow?s wonderful metaphysical wit, despite his aged weariness.

• Valcic, Sonja. "Kesey and Bellow—The Word of Madness and Inarticulateness." Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945–1985. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: English Dept., Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988. 115–19.
  

  Argues that there is a profound quest for silence running through American literature with its numerous inarticulate, silent heroes. Treats both One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and HRK. Sees Henderson, Herzog, and Tommy as exemplars of this Hemingwayesque legacy of silence. Shows how Bellow mistrusts words as human expressions and shares Faulkner's and Hemingway's belief in reconciliation by submission, by reversion to a primary contact with physical and oral sounds and natural scenes which provide levels of experience beyond language. Concludes that with Bellow the inarticulate levels of primary and transcendent experience are more important for contrast than in and of themselves.

• Varela, Lourdes Y. "Man, Society and Literature." Literature and Society: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Roger J. Bresnahan. [n.p.]: U. S. Information Service, 1977. 84–94. Eleventh American Studies Seminar held Oct. 1976, Los Banos, Philippines.
  
  
• Vargus Llossa, Mario. "Saul Bellow and Chinese Whispers." Making Waves. Ed. and trans. John King. New York: Farrar, 1997. 305–10.
  

  Details Bellow's belief in a revolution rooted in spirit and in the imagination which then nurtures all other activity from that impalpable center. Argues for Bellow's belief in the great classics of Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, and the Middle Ages as the connecting threads of civilization. Provides a catalogue of Bellow's cultural conservatisms, and ends with a tribute of appreciation that fortunately there is a Saul Bellow in face of all the Deng Xiaopings, Fidel Castros, Ayatollahs, and Kim of Sungs.

• Varvogli, Aliki. "'The Corrupting Disease of Being White': Notions of Selfhood in Mr. Sammler's Planet and Herzog." Saul Bellow Journal 16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 150–64.
  

  Argues that both MSP and H employ discourses that center around disease, beneath which lies a racialized, specifically black, discourse. Argues that Bellow is not simply a racist writer, but rather one for whom the outside world can only be experienced through his own Holocaust experience. Hence racial blackness in the novel accentuates his introspective tendencies and causes him to be interested in little else. Sammler identifies with black aggressors as victims in a war. Considers the pickpocket's actions self-ironic and fails to empathize with him because of his own myopia. However, the pickpocket ironically becomes the vehicle which returns him to life. In H, Moses too suffers from the disease of the single self. The invisibility of racial blackness in literature does not always denote an absence. Moses carries within himself the power of blackness which threatens to engulf him. Jewishness and blackness carry connotations of disease. As a romantic novel, H is pitting the disease of his Jewish cerebral activity against the healing power of black sexuality. This is playing two stereotypes against each other. Given its proper historical and cultural dimensions, blackness may, after all, cure the disease of the single self.

• Venkateswarlu, D. "Conversations with Bellow: A Personal View." Jewish–American Writers and Intellectual Life in America. Series in American Literature. New Delhi: Prestige, 1993. 174–80.
  

  Argues that Bellow's political positions, his angles of vision on contemporary American reality inevitably guide his perceptions of a given cultural domain. To get at the genesis of Bellow's critique of the generation of the sixties, one has to restructure some of the possible perceptions out of which such meditations as those in MSP

• Venkatramaiah, Y. "Saul Bellow and His Novels." Triveni: A Journal of the Indian Renaissance 51.4 (1983): 65–71. Cited in Abstracts of English Studies. 1986.
  

  Sees Bellow as an American individualist in the Huck Finn tradition by way of being an affirmative intellectual and a man who has romances with various ideologies, including Marxism. His apolitical detachments and disinterestedness now make him the most remarkable author of his age. Concludes that his novels show his invincible conviction of individual worth.

• Versluys, Kristiaan. 'How Should a Good Man Live?' Saul Bellow and the City." BELL: Belgian Essays on Language and Literature. Ed. Pierre Michel et. al. Liege: Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education, English Dept., U of Liege, 1993. 89–101.
  

  Argues that Bellow's key question in all the fiction is "How should a good man live?" and what role the interior life plays in this. Suggests that the backdrop against these questions is the dense, dark, Chicago-like city which presses upon each protagonist despite his personal opposition. Describes the long urban treks on trams and buses, the oppressive weather, and the "deep city vexations which sap their strength and befuddle them." Deals with both Chicago and New York and treats several of the novels. Concludes that ultimately Bellow's vision is a pessimistic/optimistic one, tinged with premonitions of the apocalypse. Not only does he believe that poetry and moral initiative together can do a great deal to alleviate the plight of the modern soul, he also believes that the advent of the Millennium will be preceded by a cleansing, a purification, a wiping of the slate, to which the present urban disintegration is but the cacaphonic prelude. Provides and extensive bibliographical listing of Bellow's interviews from 1953–1990. Also provides a useful interviewer Index.

• Vinoda. "The Comic Mode in Saul Bellow's Fiction." Journal of English Studies [India] 10.2 (1979): 662–67.
  

  Describes Bellow's comic modes as being implicit in his vision of life as well as in the techniques used to project that vision. Provides descriptions of comedy and character in the novels and goes on to a discussion of language and other techniques.

• Vinoda. "The Dialectic of Sex in Bellow's Fiction." Indian Journal of American Studies 12 (1982): 81–87. Rpt. rev. version as "Women in Bellow's Fiction: A Study." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 150–60.
  

  Sees one of the Bellow novels' major failings as its inability to make the "imaginative leap into the consciousness of its female characters." Examines the struggles of the Jewish male protagonist with regard to women by elucidating cultural assumptions implicit in the Eastern European shtetl. The partially assimilated Bellow protagonist finds domestic women dull and intellectual women not domestic enough. Between these two categories are sensual women whose task it is to minister to the male protagonist's sexual needs. Vinoda concludes: "The novels furnish substantial evidence to conclude that the Bellow protagonist, being a second generation Jew of the East European extraction, looks upon the American mores in much the same way as does a stranger. . . . Bellow's 'dissent' from 'modernism' could also be seen from his opposition to the emancipated female ethic."

• Vinoda. "Saul Bellow's Cultural Toots: A Study in Values." Indian Scholar [India] 4.1–2 (1982): 25–33.
  

  Describes Bellow as a second generation American Jew who inherits the shambles of the post WW II moment and must set about contructing a morally secure world out of a traditional Jewish heritage. Fleeing from extreme forms of individualism, unlimited liberty, and boundless aspiration, the American Jewish writers keep returning to their childhood world of the ghetto in search of the reassuring values of mentschlehkayt. The basic pattern of Bellow's novels is the evolution of a man into a mentsch. The assumptions about human nature at play in the novels are humane and noble ones derived from Jewish cultural sources—the obligation to be solicitous for and just toward his neighbor. Bellow's novels assert that a responsible human life of interconnectedness with people

• Vinoda. "Saul Bellow and Gustave Flaubert." Saul Bellow Newsletter 1.1 (1981): 1–5.
  

  Discusses Bellow's initial adherence to a subsequent break with Flaubert's aesthetics. Argues that this is due to Bellow's Jewish moral passion and humanistic faith in conflict with a prevailing literary modernism. Traces Bellow's statements against the Flaubertian standard throughout his fiction, essays, interviews and addresses, as he has attempted to restore dignity and moral authority to literature. Summarizes Flaubert's aesthetic creed and its relation to the debate on deconstructionist criticism. Details Bellow's specific objections to the Flaubertian aesthetic, and his definition of the role of the writer as latter-day prophet, teacher, or clergyman. Demonstrates Bellow's dissent from both European deconstructionists and American post-modernists.

• Vinoda. "The Theme of Death in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Journal of English Studies [India] 12.1 (1980): 812–19.
  

  Discusses the death theme from the perspective of protagonists who are continually aware of their earthbound experience and progressively humbled by it. Argues that for the Bellow hero only the presence of death will restore the sense of life. Points up some similarities between Bellow and Tolstoy in this regard.

• Vinoda. "Women in Bellow's Fiction: A Study." Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 150–60.
  

  Accuses Bellow of failing to make the leap into the consciousness of women characters in his unapologetically male-oriented and biblical notions of female inferiority. In fact, Bellow's heroes mar their otherwise admirable liberalism with their assumptions that women are non-intellectual, irrational, physical, animalistic, and Dionysian. Reviews other critics on the subject of Bellow and women. Traces Bellow's duality to his Jewish roots, shtetl origins, and personal experience. From a feminist perspective, the Bellow hero does not do well, a matter which derives from Bellow's ethnic base.

• Yudkin, Leon Israel. "From the Periphery to the Centre in America." Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century. London: Helm, 1982. 112–28.
  

  Calls Bellow a virtuoso writer, a technical innovator, for whom introspection is a major component. Provides a detailed analysis of Joseph in DM and of H. Both books are a detailed mapping of the human mind and the distraction of the modern world. MSP is an extended view from the perspective of agedness and of the extent to which the world has become vandalized, uncivilized, and crime-ridden. Bellow's distillation of the essence of human struggle in MSP is a diary of an individual's efforts to find himself, and to resign himself to his true nature.

• Zietlow, E. R. "Saul Bellow: The Theater of the Soul." Ariel 4.4 (1973): 44–59.
  

  Zietlow describes how "The theater of the soul represents Be!low's elaboration of the idea of a power within us and its relationship to daily life." Argues that Bellow goes from a concern in the early novels with the impact of the objetive world of the individual to a concern in the later novels with the "theater of the soul."