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“... a wild Irish town. Ironweed has won the Pulitzer Prize, after being rejected by 13 publishers. Saul Bellow urged the Viking Press to publish it, since he admired Kennedy’s other Albany novels, Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game: both these books have now been re-published as Penguin paperbacks.* The first is about the Albany gangster, Jack ...”

“... out of the chapel to the theme-music from the Antiques Roadshow, or was it Handel’s Water Music? Saul Bellow seemed to me to possess more moral lustre than your average pope, but then I only read him, I didn’t marry him, as five people did. The pope and Saul Bellow were enemies of nihilism in one form or ...”

“... approximately the same time as Mary McCarthy was chivvying and being chivvied all over Manhattan, Saul Bellow submitted his first short story for publication in the student magazine of Northwestern University. (It took third prize in the competition.) Entitled ‘The Hell It Can’t’, the story was intended to rebuke Sinclair Lewis’s Popular Front ...”

“... affectingly and almost plainly – testifies to such snares being ‘terrifically outwitted’, as Saul Bellow once put it. Inside Story is long but its identity as a novel comes in for immediate qualification. Not surprisingly, it isn’t autofiction of the Karl Ove Knausgaard kind. It isn’t a straight-up autobiographical novel either. Amis uses terms ...”

“... as a danger to Jewry. This position is a logical outcome of the premise, increasingly vital in Bellow’s writing, that things of the spirit come first – and therefore that danger to the soul outranks danger to the body. This is, obviously, a recipe for conservative politics: in Bellow’s case, it also seems to be the ...”

“... I had my doubts’) along with the unidiomatic, vaguely Yiddishy noises, probably descended from Saul Bellow: ‘I was very adoring’; ‘Me, I kind of liked this way of putting it.’ Most important, his writing preserves its special ability to get up one’s nose. This is partly due to the strange combination of whimsy and pomposity. This is a ...”

“... tonality in Amis’s writing, a darkening and a loss of exuberance in his address to the world. Saul Bellow, an exemplary figure for Amis in more than one respect, is relevant to the transition we are witnessing here: ‘Bellow has made his own experience resonate more memorably than any living writer. And yet he is ...”

“... with having a heart at all.’ These letters – which sometimes sound like an epistolary novel by Saul Bellow – are about, among many other things, what the wish not to be heartless can turn a person into. If you believe, as Berlin does and says in these letters, that ‘no end, however good, could fail to be destroyed by the adoption of monstrous ...”

“... by him for his poetry and intelligence from their early days as colleagues at Harvard; and by Saul Bellow, a close friend of both. Schwartz is read now, if at all, for his stories and best known for his protracted, wretched unravelling and decline, fictionally recounted by Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift. Plath, a ...”

“... family came over on the Mayflower, leaving her a single mother to two boys; she was taken up by Saul Bellow, who became her mentor and sometime lover. Her first story came out in his magazine Noble Savage (alongside one by Berlin). Howland was fraught, trying to make a living from low-paid shifts as a librarian and freelance editorial work for the ...”

“... that gave birth to American modern culture. And it is a bastard modernity in this sense that Saul Bellow – in the Romanes Lecture he gave in Oxford in 1990 – finds inescapable yet crippling for any writer reflecting the society of his time: In public life everybody uses the same formulas – presidents, former presidents, senior ...”

“... there is no profusion either. Dan Jacobson is not a helpless genius of memory like Nabokov or Saul Bellow: his details strike deeply home, but they are St Sebastians, martyrs to detail. Bellow, characterising Herzog, also delineates himself: ‘Almost certainly, Nachman ran away from the power of his old friend’s ...”

“... sloppier thoughts’. And Amis’s favourite American seems to be thoughtful, gloomy, energetic Saul Bellow, who gets both the opening and the closing essays. Bellow gave currency to the expression ‘moronic inferno’, which Amis thinks apt not only to America but to the rest of us; it is hard to feel cheerful ...”

“... now his best-known novel (it was a finalist for the National Book Award and received praise from Saul Bellow and Walker Percy), exposes small-town racism and adult absurdity through the voice of its precocious 12-year-old narrator, Simons Manigault. Simons is the only son of a literary lady who wants him to become a writer (hence the elaborate diction ...”

“... technical virtuosity is extraordinary. The dense excellence of his writing owes something to early Saul Bellow, more to his ear for catching and improving the phrase of the hour or minute; and a little, perhaps only by extension from Bellow, to Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is always original, colloquial and finely ...”