Saul Bellow: Letters

(Paperback)

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'Magnificent . . . The man is all here in this book, in this stunning, almost baffling plenitude. Bellow's letters are one of Bellow's greatest books.' - The New York Times Book Reviews Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Nobel Prize in Literature, Saul Bellow wrote marvellously acute, unsparing, tender, ferocious, hilarious, and wise letters throughout his long life (1915-2005). Some of the finest letters are to his fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and others. Intimate and ironical, rueful and amused, this vast self-portrait-indeed, the autobiography Bellow never wrote-shows the influences at work in the man and illuminates his enduring legacy- the novels and stories that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of readers that world over. 'Stunned with brilliant passages.' - The New Yorker 'Full of those wonderful vignettes that pepper his books, comic and perceptive at the same time.' - The Wall Street Journal 'Feisty, smart, but most of all thrillingly intimate, these letters ripen and mature as they go along.' - Chicago Tribune 'Bellow's sheer brio, his occasional feuds and deep friendships, his unquenchable enthusiasm for being human, and his incomparable prose make this collection an absolute must.' - Financial Times

Reviews

Best of 2010 Lists

The New York Times, Michiko Kakutanis Top Ten of 2010

The Washington Post, John Yardleys Best of 2010

Minneapolis Star Tribune

It comes as no surprise to find that the great novelist was a great correspondent as well. I hungrily read the book through in three nights, as though Id stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece only recently unearthed.
Philip Roth

In the Letters, as in everything he wrote, Saul Bellow never dipped below a certain leveland that level is stratospheric.
Martin Amis

Saul Bellow: Letters is a treasure trove. Its fascinating to see one of our great American writers take form.
Nathan Englander

Magnificent The man is all here in this book, in his stunning, almost baffling plenitude. Bellows letters are one of Bellows greatest books. Benjamin Taylor records that it contains only two-fifths of what Bellow called his epistling, but its riches are nonetheless immense. Taylor has selected and edited and annotated these letters with exquisite judgment and care. This is an elegantissimo book. Our literatures debt to Taylor, if our culture still cares, is considerable.
Leon Wieseltier, The New York Times Book Review

Full of those wonderful vignettes that pepper his books, comic and perceptive at the same time Theres so much going on here, such swift and impassioned dialogue between the spiritual and the physical, the place and those who inhabit it, that, as so often in his books, we can only gasp in joyful wonder.
The Wall Street Journal

Masterfully edit[ed].
Vanity Fair

A hefty, handsome volume Chatty yet polished, and always vibrant, Bellows letters serve as the autobiography he never wrote.
Los Angeles Times

You must read this. If youre a lover of prose, someone who knows how to savor the taste of a scrumptious sentence, then youll find morsels aplenty to set your eyes rolling to the back of your head in indecent pleasure.
NPR

Studded with brilliant passages Just as Bellows novels teem with the turbulence of raw immediate experience burnished by the refiners fires of insight, emotion, and style, his letters make clear that his life was the source of that connected fullness.
The New Yorker

A window into literary genius.
London Review of Books

Arresting, seizing the reader by the lapels and refusing to let go Bellow is a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer. The Bellow that floats to the surface in this volume is a close spiritual relative of the heroes who populate his fiction: a seeker and searcher who also happens to be a first-class noticer; an intellectual, deep in what he once called the profundity game, who is constantly trying to balance the equation between rumination and action, solipsism and distraction, the temptations of selfhood and the noise of the real world.
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Bellows sheer brio, his occasional feuds and deep friendships, his unquenchable enthusiasm for being human, and his incomparable prose, make this collection of letters an absolute must for anyone who is remotely interested in American literature of the 20th century.
The Financial Times

Bellow was an exceptionally astute man. He was also formidably well-read, an intellectual in the deepest sense of the word but also a lover of pleasure in many forms. His collected letters are probably the last book we shall have from him, and a very good one.
The Washington Post

Drollery, mordancy, tenderness, quick-draw portraiture, metaphysical vaudeville, soul talk, heart pains, the whole human messSaul Bellows letters are a Saul Bellow novel, the author himself the protagonist. A Saul Bellow novel! A gift from the grave, like Humboldts. The great voice again, the peerless voice.
William Deresiewicz, The Nation

Reveal[s] Bellows unfailingly high quality as a correspondent Scarcely a letter in this volume is without an amusing phrase or arresting insight or interesting formulation.
The New Criterion

Feisty, smart, but most of all thrillingly intimate, these letters ripen and mature as they go along, just as some people do.
Chicago Tribune

These letters are rich in gossip, declarations of love and ambition, praise, criticism, and commiseration; the most touching among them are to the writers for whom he had tender feeling (John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever) and those who appealed to him for help (William Kennedy, Wright Morris).
Bookforum

So richly characteristic on every page. What makes Bellow rare, possibly unique, among the great writers of the past century was [his] conviction that seeing had a metaphysical warrant, that perception, and the recording of perception, was not a pastime but an assignment.
Adam Kirsch, The Times Literary Supplement

The letters are all zest and craving and demandso many journeys, so many cities, so many liaisons, so many courtings, so many marriages and partings, so many spasms of rage, so many victories and downers, so many blue or frenetic melancholias and grievances; but cumulatively they add up to a rich montage of knowing, speckled now and again with laughter, that most metaphysical of emotions.
Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic

The virtue of these letters is found in their compassion.
Playboy

Ben Taylors meticulously edited and annotated volume of Bellows letters provides the most intimate glimpse we have yet received of how this voice emerged. Bellows language in letters, as in fiction, is stunning. His is an English both earnestly and adoringly cerebral and earthy, drawing on the cadences of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Hyde Park Trotskyism, the high-church intellectualism of the University of Chicago, and the guys and dolls patois of Damon Runyon.
Jewish Review of Books

Flecked with remarkable judgments on the people he knew Bellows letters reveal him as a restless, agitated truth-seeker, not unlike many of his characters.
National Post

These letters crackle with wit, often wicked and nonetheless satisfying for that.
Commonweal Magazine

Wonderful offers a strong salve to Praise for Saul Bellow: Letters

Author Bio

Saul Bellow's dazzling career as a novelist has been marked with numerous literary prizes, including the 1976 Nobel Prize, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. His other books include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, More Die of Heartbreak, Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize The Day and The Victim. Saul Bellow died in 2005.