Saul Bellow
Letters
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A never-before-published collection of letters - an intimate self-portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, and Wright Morris. Intimate, ironical, richly observant, and funny, these letters reveal the influcences at work in the man, and illuminate his enduring legacy-the novels that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of the world over. Saul Bellow: Letters is a major literary event and an important edition to Bellow's incomparable body of work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize winning author and acclaimed playwright Bellow has an indelible place in American letters. This compendium, the second in a series edited by Wood, follows a 1944-1953 collection, and includes three prominent novels-Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog-considered some of the finest examples of post-war American literature. Dark, devastating and funny, Bellow's writing reflects the solitude and isolation of the immigrant experience-a Russian-Jewish emigre, Bellow grew up in the Jewish ghettos of Canada, and then Chicago-as well as the troubled predicament of Judaism in post-war society. Wood, a senior editor of the New Republic, co-taught with Bellow at Boston University; he provides annotation and a helpful chronology of Bellow's life, placing these three works into context. Readers interested in analysis may be disappointed, as by and large Wood lets the text speak for itself, but the supplementary material will prove instructive for any reader, irrespective of their familiarity with the material.
