Bellow, Saul (Vol. 3) - Bellow, Saul 1915–
Bellow, Saul 1915–
Bellow, a Canadian-born Jewish-American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist, is one of America's most celebrated writers of fiction. Life and death, reason and emotion are among the principal themes of his vital, disciplined, and intellectual novels. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
Bellow's controlling images and myths tend to be social ones; ideas, political and philosophical are not something intrusive in his work, but the atmosphere, the very condition of life. He feels most deeply where his thought is most deeply involved, and his characters come alive where they are touched by ideas. It is for this reason that the most moving passages in his books are discussions, the interchange of opinions and theories as vividly presented as a love scene or a fight. But his books are never "problem" novels in the sense of the socially conscious twenties. Even The Victim (which remains...
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