A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 1

Saul Bellow (1915—2005) is one of the most prolific and energetic writers in the contemporary literary world. Be is not simply a novelist, hut an essayist, a short-story writer, a playwright, a translator and an editor. Throughout his forty-year’s writing career he has published a dozen novels and novelette, dozens of short stories, hundreds of essays, articles and translations, a full-length play, and a biography. Nobel laureate and winner of numerous prestigious fiction awards, Bellow has commanded series attention from a large range of reviews and critics at home and abroad for more than forty years. By now he is possibly the most written about novelist of the contemporary American period.

As a novelist, Saul Bellow considers it his duty to attempt to work out solutions to distraction and cope with confusion of facts, idea and emotion of everyday life. As an essayist, he shows his concern for human integrity and explores the problem of human identity assailed by physical, psychological and intellectual distractions in a selfish materialistic.

Bellow’s first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) were quite successful, earning critical acclaim far and wide. The publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953 established Bellow beyond all question as the important writer of his time: by the middle of the 1950s many critics compared the novel to Mark Twain’s masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). The succeeding publications of Seize the Day (1956) and Henderson the Rain King (1959) widened the extent of his popularity. In 1965 he won the National Book Award for his novel Herzog (1964). The year 1976 was of particular significance to Bellow, because this year he won the Pulitzer Prize for his hovel Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and the Nobel Prize for literature which is generally considered the topmost reward in the world. The citation for his Nobel Prize reads: “For the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work” (BIMAL, 302).

• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• PART 4
• PART 5
• PART 6
• PART 7
• PART 8