"[Author] provides the first systematic and extended analysis of the comic elements in [Saul] Bellow's novels -- comedy of character, of situation, of ideas, and of language."--Book jacket.

Though one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, Saul Bellow has continually elicited conflicting responses from critics. Some critics have seen him as America's greatest contemporary writer, while others have discounted him as discouragingly redundant. Not even his novel Herzog, generally considered his worthiest achievement, has gone unchallenged. The expansion of critical theory in the last decade has added to the controversy over Bellow's works. The reviews and essays gathered in this volume illustrate the many disparate critical responses and approaches to Saul Bellow over the last 50 years, from the late 1940s into the 1990s. Representative samples of criticism from the earliest reviews to the most recent assessments trace the different critical phases and approaches to Bellow's work over time. The selections included also reflect larger trends in literary criticism over the last half century and chart the history of the critical community's response to Bellow. The selections are arranged chronologically in clusters devoted to particular works.

Review: "This encyclopedia offers an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the important writers and works that form the literature about the Holocaust and its consequences. The collection is alphabetically arranged and consists of high-quality biocritical essays on 309 writers who are first-, second-, and third-generation survivors or important thinkers and spokespersons on the Holocaust. An essential literary reference work, this publication is an important addition to the genre and a solid value for public and academic libraries."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004

The son of the Nobel Prize-winning author of Humboldt's Gift describes the early, lighthearted years of his father's life, before his hardened social views created a rift that lead to a difficult relationship between them.

Brings together three of Bellow's works of short fiction--"A theft," "The Bellarosa Connection," and "Something to Remember Me By."

What distinguishes fiction from non-fiction in first-person narratives? What is the difference between a novel and autobiography? What makes a first-person narrative a literary work of art? If fiction is a self-contained meaning structure, what frame of reference can we use to tell if the narrator is «lying?» Using a phenomenological approach to these questions basic to both literary theory and practical literary criticism, Lucy L. Melbourne develops a model of the unreliable first-person narrative. By applying it to three challenging works, Saul Bellow's Dangling Man, Albert Camus's La Chute, and Franz Kafka's Ein Landarzt, she shows us how to read «between the lines» to discover the implicit text structuring first-person narratives into literary works of art.

Renowned writer Saul Bellow reflects on the times in which we live and the craft of writing. Bellow asks what meaningful words are left to write in the face of such events as revolutions, world wars, the atom bomb, and who would take the time to read them if new words were found or invented. Fortunately Faulkner is no longer alive, and unfortunately, neither is Hemingway.