Saul Bellow at Seventy-five

Saul Bellow, born in 1915, has come to be America´s most challenging literary chronicler. Where today some recognize in Bellow America´s greatest writer of twentieth century, others see an aging fumbler with words caught in the web of his own verbal narcissism. Undisputed alone is the fact that Bellow has been writing against the grain of literary fashion or cultural dictum. "Bellow at seventy-five" thus is a controversal figure: the writer who continues to battle modernist and post-modernist literary fashions; the cultural critic of America and its diverse isms; and the contemporary American whose Jewish heritage is a condition rather than a tradition.
This collection of new critical essays reflects the many facets of Bellow´s achievements, from hin increasingly influential works of the middle phase, Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964), to his most recent evaluations of contemporary society, More Die of Heartbreak (1987) and The Bellarosa Connection (1989). At the same time, these essays manifest how new critical avenues, such as the new-historicism, deconstructionism, and (post)-feminism, may issue exciting new readings of the established Bellow canon.