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.

A TRIBUTE TO SAUL BELLOW

"I AM AN AMERICAN, Chicago born-Chicago, that somber city-and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent . . ." Many readers and writers have been quoting that sentence, the opening lines of the novel The Adventures of Augic March, now that its creator, Saul Bellow, has left us to our own devices. Since Melville opened Moby Dick with that first great line of American fiction"Call me Ishmael"-and Mark Twain opened The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his own special way, no one but Bellow has fashioned an opening as memorable and as powerful-and as important-as this line that sprung open the padlock of American art language by using the pick of freestyle diction, this line that announced that American writers didn't have to glove their knuckles anymore when they knocked at the door. Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March in 1953. It won him national recognition, a National Book Award, a major place at the American literary table. "The book just came to me," he wrote. "All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it." Bellow had prepared for this one, though. His first novel, Dangling Man, came out almost a decade before. The Victim, his second novel, published in 1947, opened with a line that was almost as memorable, if more conventional: "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok." And then the rest of that novel's opening paragraph, as beautiful as anything by any of his predecessors or peers in the sweltering art of the novel: "The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky." If Bellow hadn't upped the ante with the opening of Angie Mardi, this passage alone would have been a great opening to remember him by: the allusion to a South Asian city, the geographical breadth of the imagery, the transformation of colors, gray to green and tropical, New York bustle presented in terms of the Arab street.