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“... of course it did. Roth had initially encouraged, endorsed and facilitated Atlas’s biography of Saul Bellow, but once Atlas began cataloguing some of Bellow’s more unsavoury amours and making clucking sounds of bourgeois disapproval, he incurred the ire of King Saul. Roth took ...”

“... who felt penned in by society. ‘So you’re going into anthropology; sweet Jesus!’ Saul Bellow wrote to a friend who joined him in graduate school in the 1930s. ‘It’s a hell of a lot better than the English department. And if you’re not going to train yourself in a money-making technique you could choose no better field.’ For ...”

“... On Patrick White’s Voss: ‘I admired it very much, without enjoying it.’ He enthuses about Saul Bellow; Malcolm Lowry and Richard Hughes are talismanic figures. But what comes across most strongly is the extent to which he took his cues from Europe. Camus shows up early and often – he’s mentioned in connection with the town under siege ...”

“... reading into a usable past, to choose the literary company you seek to join, or to beat. A writer, Saul Bellow said, is a reader moved to emulation. The question is not whether to imitate, but what to imitate and how.But you don’t need to apply much pressure to these claims to see that the matter isn’t straightforward. When writers imitate, what do ...”

“... as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style ...”

“... More important, these large claims have been enthusiastically endorsed by Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Lucy Dawidowicz, Arthur Goldberg and many others, and by sundry American newspapers and periodicals, including the Washington Post, Commentary and the New Republic. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein has described the book as one ‘of the ...”

“... competition. Third prize went to Solomon Bellows, who was using a revised name for the first time. Saul Bellow’s story was called ‘The Hell It Can’t’. It was a response to Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, which had come out the year before, describing the Fascist regime of President Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip, and the struggle ...”

“... to notch a name for himself as a reviewer who doesn’t kiss up to the consensus. His pan of Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March, which was being acclaimed as the breakthrough postwar Jewish-American novel, a virtuoso marriage of vernacular and rollicking picaresque, enrages Bellow’s posse – ‘We’ll ...”

“... was mutual: Robbe-Grillet admired Burroughs and Nabokov but disdained the ‘pseudo-realism of Saul Bellow and Mailer’.) He had always had a predilection for modern painting and music, and his ambition for the nouveau nouveau roman was to win the same liberties that had freed painters from the obligation to represent ‘reality’ or to mine its ...”

“... take the branch to the right you will hit a stalled car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this ...”

“... personas, assessing self-images and calibrating their place in a society ceaselessly on the make. Saul Bellow’s fiction repeatedly bemoans the haplessness of eggheads in the garish drama of American-style freedom and democracy. Mendelson shows how some prominent writers actually enacted, as well as writing about, the crisis of man in America. The most ...”

“... policy, the high praise for Israel’s moral values, the testimony of cultural authorities such as Saul Bellow, who sees in Israel a land ‘where almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancour against the Arabs is rare’. Worse yet, there are the many cases where apologists for Zionism and socialism like Irving Howe ignore the killing of Jews ...”

“... to have human sympathies without the aid of religion or literature. Saturday has an epigraph from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964). Awaiting his mistress, who will shortly reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by ...”

“... brand of suffering Judaism, symbolically renounces goyish savagery. The New York Jewish hero of Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, is plagued by an alcoholic gentile misfit named Allbee, who is no less of a bum and a drifter than Alpine, even if his assault on Leventhal’s hard-won composure is intellectually more urbane. The most imposing ...”

“... which I measure myself, and to which I would be honoured to belong. There’s a beautiful image in Saul Bellow’s latest novel, The Dean’s December. The central character, the Dean, Corde, hears a dog barking wildly somewhere. He imagines that the barking is the dog’s protest against the limits of dog experience: ‘For God’s sake,’ the dog is ...”