|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other authors named Saul:
|
|
|
|
Author's popularity: 3
Vote:  
|
If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
|
|
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Any artist should be grateful for a nanve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you." |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | What is art but a way of seeing? |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. |
|
Biography
|
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005), was an acclaimed Canadian-born American Jewish writer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening. While on a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris, he wrote most of his best-known novel, The Adventures of Augie March.
He was born Solomon (nicknamed 'Sollie') Bellows (earlier 'Belo/v') in Lachine, Quebec, shortly after his parents had emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. The family moved to the slums of Chicago, the city where he received his schooling and that was to form the backdrop to many of his novels, when he was nine; Bellow's father worked there as an onion importer. His lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. A period of illness in his youth both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his bookishness) and provided an opportunity to satisfy Bellow's hunger for reading: reportedly he decided to be a writer when he first read Uncle Tom's Cabin. John Podhoretz, a pupil at the University of Chicago, said that Bellow and Allan Bloom, a close friend of Bellow (see Ravelstein), 'inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air'.
Here is Podhoretz on Bellow's physical appearance (see links): 'Bellow was then 65, and even at the time was one of the best-looking men on earth—despite a set of sadly neglected teeth. (In the 1940s a Hollywood talent scout spotted Bellow’s photograph on the back flap of the dust jacket of his second novel, The Victim, and offered him a screen test.) He was neat, precise, slight and thin. He would speak for three or four minutes and when he had finished, you realised that what he had just done was spontaneously speak a beautifully written essay.'
Bellow has taught at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University where he cotaught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss Seize the Day). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow relocated in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery of Brattleboro, Vermont.
Bellow began his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago but left after two years to complete his degree not in English, but in anthropology at Northwestern University. It has been suggested that the study of anthropology has had an interesting influence on his literary style.
Before Bellow started his career as a writer he wrote book reviews for ten dollars apiece. His early works earned him the reputation as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century, and by his death he was regarded by many as the greatest living novelist in English. He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."
Although not as widely acclaimed as some of his novels, Bellow's later works include the powerful and well-crafted collection of short stories entitled Him with His Foot in His Mouth.
Bellow's story lines are led by the personal quests and crises of his protagonists rather than by action. Our introduction to a Bellow protagonist is often at a point of deep crisis in the character's life. Whether romantic, financial or sparked by other causes, the turmoil experienced by a typical Bellow protagonist leads to deep existential questioning. Bellow artfully manages to reference the teachings of great philosophers and thinkers within many of his novels, usually without damaging their readability or disrupting story flow. One remarkable example of this technique is seen within Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow's novel about a curmudgeonly Holocaust survivor living in New York City amid the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
Examples of Prose
This is the famous and often quoted beginning of Augie March:
::Everyone knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.
Adam Mars-Jones's gloss on this is: 'Maybe the fact that he starts low and goes high, rather than starting high and going low, in terms of cultural reference, was a breakthrough in its own way.'
This longer excerpt from James Wood's review of the Atlas biography is an attempt to explain Bellow's genius (for the full article see Bibliography, 'On Bellow'):
...(more on Wikipedia)
|
|
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Saul Bellow".
|
|
|