Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (born the July 10th 1915 with Lachine, Quebec - died the April 5th 2005 with Brookline, Massachusetts, the United States) is a contemporary American writer. He accepted the Nobel Prize of literature in 1976.

Biography

Born in Lachine (Quebec) in 1915, wire of Russian immigrants , raised at the school of the street but university of career (in particular with Chicago), Saul Bellow obtained three times the National Book Award, for the adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964) and the planet of Mr. Sammler (1969). Devoted “better American writer of his generation”, in front of Norman To net, the Nobel the glorifie in 1976. This artist who mixes the slang with Jewish metaphysics, five times divorced, lived between the Vermont and Boston, remarié with a thirty year old ex-coed his junior, when he dies in 2005.

His/her parents emigrated of Russia towards Canada in 1913. Bellow was high until the 9 years age in a poor and polyglot district of Montreal, lived by Russians, of the Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks and Italians. After the death of his/her father (who made the bootlegger - is the clandestine alcohol distillation and traffic) the family from went away in 1924 to Chicago. Although Bellow is not regarded as a writer with the autobiographical writing, its Canadian roots play a part in its first novel, The Dangling Man (1944), just as its Jewish heritage and its many divorces forge a certain number of characters of its novels. The death of his/her mother whereas it was 17 years old was for him a very major emotional shock. In 1933 Bellow between with the University of Chicago, then goes to Northwestern University, where he studies anthropology and sociology; it is graduate in 1937. As friendly council, the director of the English department of faculty indicated to him that it was for him to better forget all his project studies of the language: “No Jew could really grasp the tradition off English literature. ” ( No Jew could truly seize the tradition of the English literature ).

During the holidays of Christmas, Bellow fell in love, Maria and gave up her doctoral studies with Wisconsin University to become a writer. However, Bellow spent several years to publish its first book. He taught in Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers' College of Chicago, 1938 to 1942 and worked then at the leading department of Encyclopedia Britannica of 1943 to 1944. In 1944-45 it was useful in the American Merchant navy. After the war, Bellow turned over to teaching, being used in stations varied in the universities as Minnesota, New York, Princeton and Puerto Rico. Bellow had three wire of the first of its four marriages. In 1989 he married with Janis Freedman. From this last marriage, a girl was born in 1999.

Saul Bellow died on April 5th, 2005, at the 89 years age.

Works

At this point in time it is in the Merchant navy, that Bellow written The Dangling Man , which describes the intellectual and spiritual tensions of an young man who will be enlisted. The novel is somewhat founded on the work of Dostoïevski: the Notebooks of the basement (1864). This work was followed by The Victim (1947), a paranoiac history nourished with the realistic scenes of the life in New York. However, it is Chicago which became the city most present in the works of Bellow.

" The people off Chicago are very proud off to their wickedness. This is good old vulgar politics, despite the pretensions." (“the inhabitants of Chicago are very proud of their spite. It is about the vulgar political good old, in spite of their claims” dixit Bellow in the NewYork Times , July 6th, 1980).

In the Adventures off Augie March (1953), Bellow changes register and gives up certain forms which it had followed in its first two novels. It started to write its book in Paris, where it remains thanks to a purse of the Foundation Guggenheim, and continued in various other cities, but " not has individual Word off the book was composed in Chicago, " will say T it later ( “not only one word of the book was not composed in Chicago” ).

This picaresque novel tells a little incoherent experiments of its hero in his search of the comprehension of oneself. Augie March, the protagonist, was born in an Jewish family emigrated in Chicago, before the Depression. His/her mother is poor and almost blind man. George, her younger brother, one is delayed mental and his/her older brother, Simon, want to become rich as quickly as possible. Each one of them is drafted untimely into hardships (prematurely forced to face difficulties). The life of Augie is made unstable odd jobs and adventures. Its employers are as well the Einhorn real estate agent as Mrs. Renling, owner of a smart store for men, as well as other colourful characters, energetic, obsessed by the sex, or making money or both. Augie loves the women and observes closely each piece of their anatomy. In its mystical search to discover the lesson and the theory of the capacity , Augie finds everywhere only lies and wonders why it falls all the time on " théoriciens". The novel is an anthem with the urban life, which can avoid sentimentality and ends in the great laughter full with vitality of Augie.

At the beginning of its career, Bellow was influenced by the trotskism and a group of intellectuals around the Partisan Review . It rejects the model of the hard to expensive cook ( tough Guy ) with Ernest Hemingway and with the American fiction and engages soon in cultural horizons and traditions different - Nietzsche, the conflicts œdipiens, the popular culture, the heritage of the Russian Jews. Dice the first Bellow books examined the relation author-character-narrator. Also, because Bellow always wrote with the first anybody, one often made the error believe that this narration represented its own thoughts.

" No writer edge take it for granted that the views off his characters will not Be attributed to him personally, " T it has says. " It is generally assumed, moreover, that all the vents and ideas off has off Novell are based one the life experiments and the opinions the novelist himself." (No writer can take for asset that the ideas of its characters will not be allotted to him personally. Moreover, one generally supposes that all the adventures and ideas contained in a novel are based on the personal experience and the opinions specific to the novelist. Bellow in the NewYork Times , March 10th, 1994)

In the part The Last Analysis (1965) Bellow tackled the naive freudism, The Dean' S December , More Die Of Heartbreak , and has Theft looked further into its exploration of work of Carl Jung, while Sixteen The Day uses reasons resulting from the social anthropology. With the Adventures off Augie March Bellow changes style and pays homage to Mark Twain. Herzog (1964), the central novel of Bellow of the Sixties, is focused on a Jewish intellectual of Middle Age, Moses E. Herzog, whose life became like a still life. It is at the edge of the suicide and writes long letters with a little everyone, with Nietzsche, Heidegger, its Madeleine ex-wife, Adlai Stevenson and God. Like Augie March, Moses Herzog introverted and is disturbed a little, but it finally also finds that it has multiple reasons to be content with its life. After having poured all the thoughts of Herzog in these letters, Bellow notes at the end of the book: " At this time He had No messages for anyone. Nothing. Not has individual word." ( “At this time it did not have any message for anyone. Nothing. Not only one mot.” )

" Bellow, too, is convinced that to cut is aware is, after has certain old, to live permanently in year epistemological hell. The reason his and Dostoevsky' S heroes unable are off ever arriving At any closure is that they coils to their own suffering above everything else. They refuses to exchange to their inner torment for the peace off mind that comes with middle-class propriety gold summons kind off religious belief. In fact, they see to their suffering ace perhaps the last outpost off the heroic in our day and age." (“Bellow, to him-also is convinced that to have a conscience returns, last a certain age, with living in an epistemological hell. The reason for which its characters, like those of Dostoïevski, are unable to reach the least finality is because they like their own suffering more than anything else. They refuse to exchange their interior torment for the peace of spirit which would come from the middle-class propriety or any religious belief. In fact, they perceive their suffering like the last possible heroic posture in the current world.” Charles Simic in the New York Review off Books , May 31st, 2001)

From 1960 to 1962 Bellow was Co-editor of the literary magazine The Noble Savage and in 1962 he off becomes professor with the Committee Social Thought at the University of Chicago (where sign Allan Bloom and later the historian French François Furet). In 1975, Bellow visits Israel and records its impressions in its first not-fictional book, To Jerusalem And Back (1975). The disenchantment of Bellow relating to the Establishment of left is reflected in its novel Mr. Sammler' S Planet (1970), where Arthur Sammler, an old Polish Jew, survivor of the Shoah, looks of its single intact eye the world of the black pick-pockets, the revolutionary students and the badly high young generation. Humboldt' S Gift (1975), which is worth the Prix Pulitzer to him, is written with the first nobody. The protagonist, Charlie Citrine, is a writer with success. But in its for interior it knows that there is a fault - it is under the cut of a gangster of Chicago, ruined by a divorce and finally given up by its mistress. He admires his friend deceased, Von Humboldt Fleischer, whose model is the poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). Humboldt, with the wasted talent, represents for him all that the culture can represent of important. Citrine the series of the “failures” of Bellow continues, of Herzog with Sammler, but like its other novels, it does not have this glaucous aspect and has a comic side including in the tragedy which the main character saw.

" Odd that mankind' S benefactors should Be amusing people. In America least this is often the box. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it." (“It is strange that the benefactors all of humanity is of amusing people. In America at least, it is often the case. Whoever wants to control the country must also divert it. ” drawn from the novel Ravelstein )

Bellow also published news and plays. Its preserving tone of the years 1970 and the beginning of the year 1980 changes with the collection of news Him With His Foot In His Mouth (1984), which takes a turn more slackened. The Bellarosa Connection (1989) share of an anecdote that Bellow heard at the time of a dinner.

Bellow did not lose its capacity to be given birth to from the controversies, as its thirteenth novel proves it ( Ravelstein , 2000). It traces the portrait of Abe Ravelstein, a homosexual professor of university which ends up dying of the diseases caused by the AIDS. The character of Ravelstein is built on the figure of Allan Bloom, colleague and friend of Bellow at the University of Chicago and author of The Closing off the American Mind (in French: the disarmed Heart , 1987), deceased in 1992. The official cause of died of Bloom was a dysfunction of the liver. Bellow had promised in Bloom to write a book on him. The sexual inclinations of Ravelstein are not the essence of the book of Bellow, but criticisms found them extremely interesting.

" This has problem that writers off fiction always cuts to face in this country. People are literal minded, and they say, “Is it true? Yew it is true, is it factually accurate? Yew it isn' T factually accurate, why isn' T it factually accurate?” Then you tie yourself into knots, because writing has Novell in nap ways resemble writing has biography, goal it really isn' T. It is full off invention." (“It is a problem to which the writers of fiction must face in our country. People are too prosaic and ask: “Is this true? And if it is true, that does correspond to the facts? And if that does not correspond to the facts, why not?” Then, you are taken with the trap, because to write a novel is almost like writing a biography, but not completely. A novel is full with invention. ” Bellow in the review Time , May 8th, 2000)

The attitude of Bellow with regard to the Blacks also caused debates. In an interview ( The New Yorker , March 7th, 1988) he asks: “Which is Tolstoï of the Zulus? ” - this time, behind the comment, it is not any more one character of fiction which speaks, but the writer himself, which wants to show that “the discussions open on many important public questions became taboos for some time. ”

Works

Dangling Man , 1944 ( outstanding the man means )
The Victim , 1947 ( the victim means)
The Adventures Of Augie March , 1953 - National Book Award ; French translation: adventures of Augie March
Sixteen The Day , 1956 - French translation: From day to day
Henderson The Rain King , 1959 - French translation: the maker of rain
Herzog , 1964 - National Book Award ; French translation: Herzog
The Last Analysis , 1965 (theater; mean: the last analysis )
Mosby' S Memoirs, And Other Stories , 1968 (news) - French translation: Memories of Mosby and other news
Mr. Sammler' S Planet , 1970 - National Book Award (means: the planet of Mr. Sammler )
Humboldt' S Gift , 1975 - Pulitzer Prize (means: the gift of Humboldt )
To Jerusalem And Back , 1976 (voyage) - French translation: Return of Jerusalem
The Dean' S December , 1982 - French translation: the winter of the senior
Him With His Foot In His Mouth And Other Stories , 1984 (news) - French translation: Gaffeur
More Die Off Heartbreak , 1987 - French translation: the breathless heart
has Theft , 1989 (news) - French translation: a larceny
The Bellarosa Connection , 1989 (news) - French translation: the connection of Bellarosa
Something To Remember Me By , 1991 (news; mean: Of what to remember you me )
The Actual , 1997 (news) - French translation: a true affinity
Ravelstein , 2000 - French translation: Ravelstein

Complementary readings

Saul Bellow by R. Deitweiler (1967)
Saul Bellow' S Enigmatic Laughter by S.B. Cohen (1974)
Saul Bellow , ED. by E.H. Rovit (1975)
Saul Bellow by Mr. Harris (1980)
Quest for the Human by E.L. Rodrigues (1981)
Saul Bellow by Mr. Beadbury (1982)
Saul Bellow' S Moral Vision by L.H. Goldman (1983)
Saul Bellow by D. Fuchs (1984)
Saul Bellow , ED. by H. Bloom (1986)
One Bellow' S Planet by J. Wilson (1986)
Sort off Columbus by J.A. Braham (1984)
Saul Bellow by RF Kiernan (1989)
Saul Bellow against the Grain by E. Pifer (1990)
Saul Bellow and the Declines off Humanism by M.K. Glenday (1990)
Saul Bellow by R. Miller (1991)
Saul Bellow by Peter Hyland (1992)
The Critical Response to Saul Bellow , ED. by Gerhard Bach (1995)
Handsome Is: Adventures With Saul Bellow by Harriet Wasserman (1997)
New Essays one Sixteen the Day , ED. by Michael P.Kramer (1998)
Saul Bellow: In Biography by James Atlas (2000) -

See also : Chaim Potok, rabbi and writer and Isaac Bashevis Singer, which wrote its work in Yiddish (in New York) and translated it itself into English. It should be noted that a thesis of Doctorate written by Mrs Benjamin-Labartha on the work of Saul Bellow is available to the Library of the University Montesquieu-Bordeaux IV.

Sources

The Encyclopedia Americana, 1971
Lexikon der Weltliteratur, 1988
Encyclopedia off World Literature, 1999

Bonds

Be-X-old: СолБэлоў

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