Back Novels 1984–2000

Saul Bellow: Novels 1984–2000

Edited by James Wood

The final volume in the definitive edition of the Nobel laureate’s complete novels

Overview

Overview

Influences Dinaw Mengestu on American Writers Who Have Astounded, Moved, Haunted, and Influenced Him
July 31, 2024

Interviews James Wood: Reality, not realism, in three mid-period Bellow novels
November 19, 2015

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By the 1980s Saul Bellow—winner of three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature—had been celebrated for three decades as a writer of towering significance. In his career’s final phase, he remained an uproarious comic storyteller, a provocative thinker, and a magnificent prose stylist. But the later Bellow could also surprise his readers, above all in Ravelstein, an unforgettable depiction of his friend Allan Bloom. This remarkable novel, an instant classic when published in 2000, joins five works from the 1980s and 1990s in this concluding installment of The Library of America’s four-volume edition of Bellow’s complete novels.

“If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest,” Cynthia Ozick wrote in a 1984 review of the short masterpiece What Kind of Day Did You Have?, “then Bellow’s charge has been to restore the soul to American literature.” Taking up his characteristic themes of the life of the mind and the unruly needs of the body, Bellow traces a day in the life of art critic Victor Wulpy, “one of the intellectual captains of the modern world,” who during a lecture trip to Buffalo impulsively summons his mistress to join him—and a snowstorm turns a routine flight home into a trying odyssey. Similar concerns are explored on a larger canvas in More Die of Heartbreak (1987), in which a renowned botanist and his nephew explore their complicated (and largely disastrous) entanglements with women and the even more bewildering spectacle of contemporary America, “that terrific posthistorical enterprise carrying our destinies.”

Three short works show Bellow’s skillful use of the novella form. In A Theft (1989), a banal incident involving a missing ring becomes the catalyst for fashion editor Clara Velde to understand “who it is that’s at the middle of me.” The Bellarosa Connection (1989), a searching inquiry into the power and limits of memory, tells the tale of a Holocaust survivor determined to meet his rescuer. The Actual (1997), according to Bellow a book “about the tenacity of early affections,” is the moving story of an aging antiquities dealer who reencounters an old flame.

In Ravelstein, his last book, Bellow created one of his most indelible characters. Abe Ravelstein is a professor of political philosophy and an intellectual celebrity whose taste for worldly pleasures—designer suits, Cuban cigars, and exquisite young men—is as expansive as his erudition. Falling ill and facing death, he asks his friend Chick to write his biography, which emerges in fits and starts but ultimately grasps the essence of this extraordinary man. As critic Stanley Crouch has written, Ravelstein “attempts to answer the question central to all human communities: What does it mean to be civilized?”

James Wood, editor of The Library of America’s multi-volume edition of Saul Bellow’s works, is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of How Fiction Works and The Fun Stuff and Other Essays, among other books.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-352-1 867 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 260 Library of America Series

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