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Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow

  • A collection of treasured stories by the unchallenged master of American fiction

    Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America’s greatest writers. For more than sixty years he stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” “Leaving the Yellow House,” and a previously uncollected piece, “By the St. Lawrence.” With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new readers.

  • Harry Trellman doesn’t belong. Not in the Chicago orphanage where he is sent by his mother, not in high school (too brainy), not even on the streets. Human attachments? Yes, he has them, but they are like everything else in his life, singular and irregular. People who know him say that he “drowns his feelings in his face,” and that he has a Mongolian “masked look.” But though Harry stands apart, he has always been a most keen observer, listener, recorder, and interpreter, and none of this is lost on the Chicago billionaire, Sigmund Adletsky, who takes Harry into his “brain trust.” He retains Harry to advise him. They discuss ordinary things—they gossip together. Old Adletsky has set feelings aside while he amassed his vast fortune. The old man is so apt that he divines the secrets behind Harry’s mask, and brings him together with the one person Harry has loved dumbly for forty years.

    Amy Wustrin has not exactly stood apart from the sexual revolution while waiting for Harry to come wooing. Far from remaining the static object of his fantasy, she has moved about in the real world, from one marriage to another, from rich to broke, from hot high-school girl to correct matron. Still, in Amy, Harry sees what he calls his “actual.” Harry has had his opportunities with Amy, but it is not until he finds himself at the cemetery with her for the exhumation and reburial of her husband that he feels free to speak out.

  • Mr. Artur Sammler is, above all, a man who has lasted, from the civilized pleasures of English life in the 1920s and 30s through the war and death camps in Poland. Moving now through the chaotic and dangerous streets of New York’s Upper West Side, Mr. Sammler is attentive to everything, and appalled by nothing. He brings the same dispassionate curiosity to the activities of a black pickpocket on an uptown bus, the details of his niece Angela’s sex life, and his daughter’s lunacy as he does to the extraordinary theories of one Dr. V. Govinda Lal on the use we are to make of the moon now that we have reached it.

    Beneath this novel’s comedy, sadness, shocking action, and superb character-drawing there runs a strain of speculation, both daring and serene, on the future of life on this planet—Mr. Sammler’s planet—and any other planets for which we may be destined.

  • Saul Bellow evokes all the rich colors and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this acclaimed comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson’s awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life win him the admiration of the tribe—but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story, Henderson the Rain King is also a profound look at the forces that drive a man through life.

  • Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously—and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein’s own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.

    Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow’s novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.

  • The tenth novel by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Saul Bellow

    Kenneth Trachtenberg, an eccentric and witty native of Paris, travels to the Midwest to spend time with his famous American uncle, a world-renowned botanist and self-described “plant visionary.” After numerous affairs and failed relationships, the restless Uncle Benn seeks a settled existence in the form of marriage—but tying the knot again opens the door to a host of new torments. Benn’s erotic tendencies and disastrous relationships lead him and Kenneth into a hilarious and wonderful romp through America’s mind-body dilemma—a journey in which Kenneth must also examine his own shortcomings with women.

    Philosophical and humorous, More Die of Heartbreak mercilessly examines the inner workings of a man in desperate pursuit of happiness.

  • Albert Corde is a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago university. He and his wife, Minna, travel to Bucharest, Romania, where Minna's mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semiconscious in the local state hospital. As Corde tries to adapt to life in his mother-in-law's small apartment and cope with her relations and friends, news filters through to him of problems he left behind in Chicago: one of his students has been murdered, and a series of articles he is writing offends powerful and influential Chicagoans he had thought of as friends. Gradually it becomes clear that Corde's trip abroad is more than a brief interlude in a calm and orderly life, and that nothing will ever be the same again. Witty and erudite, The Dean's December will be a delight to fans of Saul Bellow.

  • In this unique noir masterpiece by the incomparable Saul Bellow, a young man is sucked into the mysterious, heat-filled vortex of New York City.

    Asa Leventhal, a temporary bachelor with his wife away on a visit to her mother, attempts to find relief from a Gotham heat wave only to be accosted in the park by a down-at-the-heels stranger who accuses Leventhal of ruining his life. Unable to shake the stranger, Leventhal is led by his own self-doubts and suspicions into a nightmare of paranoia and fear.

  • An essential masterwork by Nobel laureate Saul Bellow

    Expecting to be inducted into the army during World War II, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Written in diary format, Bellow’s first novel documents Joseph’s psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

  • This extraordinary book is the result of Saul Bellow’s sojourn in Israel in 1975. A personal record of his stay—his experiences and impressions—as well as a meditation, it crackles with wit and controversy on America’s relationship with this embattled country.

    Using quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow captures the personal opinions, passions, and dreams of several Israelis, and he also adds to these his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. The varying viewpoints of those he encounters and interviews offer a revealing look at the history and challenges of Israel, and Bellow’s passionate storytelling draws listeners in to share in his experience.

  • Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as "the type that loses the girl"); and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding and offers him one last hope.

  • Herzog is a man seeking balance, trying to regain a foothold on his life. Thrown out of his ex-wife’s house, Herzog retreats to his abandoned home in a remote village in the Berkshire Mountains. Amid the dust of the disused house, he begins scribbling letters to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex-presidents—anyone with whom he feels compelled to set the record straight. The letters—which are never sent—are a means to cure himself of the psychic strain of the failures of his life: that of being a bad husband, a loving but poor father, an ungrateful child, a distant brother, an egoist to friends, and an apathetic citizen.

    Herzog is primarily a novel of redemption. For all of its innovative techniques and brilliant comedy, it tells one of the oldest of stories. Like The Divine Comedy, it progresses from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment. Today it is still considered one of the greatest literary expressions of postwar America.

  • For years, they were the best of friends: Humboldt, a grand, erratic figure, and Charlie, a young man of frenzied and noble longings. But by the 1970s, Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life by leaving him something in his will.

    Now Charlie is middle-aged and his days are cluttered with comic absurdities. A thinker, he longs to come from left field and knock them all dead. But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in lawsuits; he is held in thrall by a sexually-beguiling but unsuitable young woman; he has fallen into the hands of a neurotic mafioso; and his career seems to have ground to a halt. How the gentle but resilient Charlie comes to know how to triumph over his ever more ridiculous tribulations is the great discovery of Humboldt's Gift.

  • This grand-scale heroic comedy tells the story of the exuberant young Augie, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression.

    While his neighborhood friends all settle down into their various chosen professions, Augie, as particular as an aristocrat, demands a special destiny. He latches on to a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each one as too limiting. It is not until he tangles with a glamorous perfectionist named Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, that his independence is seriously threatened. Luckily, his nature, like the eagle’s, breaks down under the strain. He goes on to recruit himself to even more outlandish projects but always ducks out in time to continue improvising his unconventional career.

    With a jaunty sense of humor embedded in a serious moral view, Bellow’s story both celebrates and satirizes the irrepressible American spirit.