R.I.P. Saul Bellow:
In case you hadn’t heard, Saul Bellow, one of the giants of American literature, has died. He was 89. He leaves behind more than a dozen novels, a Nobel Prize, three National Book Awards and several generations of students.
I read Bellow’s novella Seize the Day in high school and found it thick and dull. But as I spent time as a journalist in publishing, as I interviewed other Jewish writers like Michael Chabon, Ethan Canin and others, again and again they pointed to Bellow as their inspiration. They claimed Bellow and novels like Henderson the Rain King and The Adventures of Augie March gave Jewish authors the permission to be more than chroniclers of the shtetl and the Lower East Side. Augie March’s first line "I am an American, Chicago born" gave two generations of Jewish authors the right to identify themselves as Americans as well as Jews. And while that assimilationist tendancy has fallen out of fashion (now, thankfully, it’s hip to be Jewish and proud of it), Jewish-American authors and American Jews at large first had to feel as though they too belonged in their adopted homeland, not as guests or interlopers, but as participating artists, workers, voters and citizens. Saul Bellow and his immense literary output stood at the head of this change and pushed forward hard.
Several Bellow essays via The Happy Booker.
Roundup of Bellow coverage via The Elegant Variation.