From the San Francisco Chronicle‘s David Kipen:
Saul Bellow, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-born writer whose groundbreaking 1953 novel “The Adventures of Augie March” helped craft the template for half a century of first-generation American fiction, died Tuesday in his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.
“The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow,” Philip Roth said Tuesday. “Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century.”
Along with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Bellow’s Augie March, with it’s richly colloquialized and quintessentially American diction, helped paved the way for the Beats, and for later novelists like Roth and Pynchon.
One of America’s greatest novelists Bellow was—a literary giant whose unique vigor will forever pulse through the brilliant arrangements of words he leaves behind. Rest in peace.
I have to admit to being woefully under-read in regards to classics such as Bellows and Faulkner (wasn’t he the ‘Winds of War’ fellow, or is my ignorance that sweeping?) As a mea-culpa, I offer my lack of post-secondary education. I did read Salinger however, thanks to a fantastic high school teacher. And I am quite familiar with the names of these two…
I’ll be sure to pick up a book by one of these literary titans next time I’m in Bangkok.
RIP Mr. Bellows…
John J. Miller of NRO’s The Corner has an interesting post about Bellow and his son.
I’d have to admit that Bellows and Steinbeck were ruined for me by English classes where Henderson the Rain King and The Pearl were mandatory reading.
I understand that both authors have written better books, and that many people have enjoyed their works as literature. Unfortunately, hours and hours of meaningless, value-free, technical analysis and incessant repetition of fawning praise upon the more poorly written chapters—“because of the *artistic genius*—has inextricably associated the authors’ names with personal experiences of mental cruelty.
Which is sad, really. I’ve read James Michener, Gunter Grass, and John Irving in order to pump words through the old cognition center…..and how could Bellow really be worse?
John Irving, now there’s an author I’ve really enjoyed. Especially “A prayer for Owen Meany”, I laughed a lot with that book.
You’re absolutely right in that some teachers have a way of ruining books sometimes. That’s why I’ll always be thankful to Mrs. Fawcett and Miss Orland for encouraging me to first enjoy a book for the sake of the enjoyment itself, then decide for myself if it has any deeper meaning.
I love Gunter Grass. I wish I could read it in the German.
Like Dickens, John Irving is an acquired taste, I guess.
I STILL CAN’T EVER READ A POST BY THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST WITHOUT THINKING OF OWEN MEANY, though.
I’ve never read anything by Saul Bellows, but I’ll have to give some of his work a look. I tend to agree with Jeff on most things fiction-related.
And Seth, no, Faulkner didn’t write The Winds of War. You’re thinking of Herman Wouk. I never read that, either, but I remember liking the miniseries when I was a kid.
Bellows will be missed. And at least for me, his books have held up a lot better than Catcher in the Rye over the years.
I can definitely sympathize with Seth and cthulhu, though. I took more than a few English courses where I remember thinking that if this were my first exposure to the material, I’d never look at the books again.
Thanks Sean for the info about Herman Wouk, that rings a bell now that you say so. I suppose I could have found that out myself, but I didn’t feel like Googling William Faulkner.
Sometimes it’s just too tedious to fact-check myself.
I was assigned Mr. Sammler’s Planet in college, and read about a third of it. It interested me enough to buy Herzog, though sad to say I never read it, either. But since I did read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, I was curious to read Bellows’ Ravelstein. Not yet, though. Guess Mark Twain was right: A classic is a book that no one wants to read but everyone wants to have read.
From all my nibbling I did learn that Bellows set himself apart from the spare, tough guy prose style of Hemingway:
Turing = material, as in all the world is a writer’s material.
From the “Saul Bellow Society” site, the following is offered as descriptive of the late authors work and world view:
“Scorning absurdism, nihilism, alienation ethics, and belief in Deus Abscondus, refuting historicist pessimism, preaching against the void, and defending the embattled masculine self of Western metaphysics, Bellow has affirmed Judeo-Christian religious and social values more strongly perhaps than any other twentieth-century writer.”
I can’t think of a better reason to go back and pick through his earlier work. I’ve read only Ravelstein, and that was driven by my absolute adoration of Alan Bloom. It’s a fine book and a very funny and moving tribute to Bellow’s best intellectual friend.
RIP, Saul Bellow.
Those interested in reading more about Bellow’s literary perspective can go to this page:
http://www.saulbellow.org/NavigationBar/LifeandWorks.html
Bellow: “Show me the Proust of the
Papuans, the Tolstoy of the Zulus, and I will read him.â€Â
RIP
My favorite lines from Augie March:
“It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there’s a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.”