Saul Bellow - 'I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer'

"Born in 1915 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow was raised in the small town - "a medieval" shtetl he called it - of Lachine, Quebec, and then in a predominantly Jewish section of Montreal until the age of nine. He had a trilingual childhood which included Yiddish as well as English and French. In an insightful new look at Bellow's life and career, Gerald Sorin argues that Bellow's immersion in Yiddish and childhood memories of the vibrant Jewish life on Montreal's Napoleon and Dominique streets continued to echo in his adult inner ear and permeated almost all of his writing. Much of Bellow's creative power, including the dynamic, comic, and lusty language that became his literary signature, was shaped and informed by the fact that he was Jewish"--

List of contents

Acknowledgments

List of Transliterations

Introduction

1. In the Beginning

2. Adapting to America

3. The Education of Saul Bellow

4. Dangling Men

5. In the Shadow of the Holocaust

6. In the Land of the Holocaust

7. The Adventures of Saul Bellow

8. Fathers and Sons

9. Husbands and Wives

10. Friendships and Betrayals

11. Wealth, Fame, and Jewish Identity in 1960s America

12. Love and Death

13. Bellow's Gift, Israel, and the Nobel Prize

14. Bellow's December

15. A Whole New Life

16. Bellow Banished and Bruised

17. Life and Death

Appendix: Saul Bellow's First Published Piece

Notes

Sources and Bibliography

Index

About the author

Gerald Sorin

Product details

• Authors: Gerald Sorin, Gerald (State University of New York At Pal Sorin, Gerald (State University of New York at Paltz) Sorin
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.04.2024
• EAN: 9780253069436
• ISBN: 978-0-253-06943-6
• No. of pages: 602
• Series: The Modern Jewish Experience
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies