Saul Bellow: I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer

Saul Bellow: ＂I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer＂ offers a fresh and original perspective on the life and works of Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1976. Author Gerald Sorin emphasizes Bellow’s Jewish identity as fundamental to his being and the content and meaning of his fiction. Bellow’s work from the 1940s to 2000, when he wrote his last novel at the age of 84, centers on the command in Deuteronomy to ＂Choose life＂ as distinct from nihilistic withdrawal and the defense of meaninglessness.

Although Bellow disdained the label of ＂American Jewish Writer,＂ Sorin conjectures that he was an outstanding representative of the classification. Bellow and the characters in his fiction not only choose life but also explore what it means to live a good life, however difficult that may be to define, and regardless of how much harder it is to achieve. For Sorin, Bellow realized that at least two obstacles stood in the way: the imperfection of the world and the frailty of the human pursuer.

Saul Bellow: ＂I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer＂ provides a new and insightful narrative of the life and works of Saul Bellow. By using Bellow’s deeply internalized Jewishness and his remarkable imagination and creativity as a lens, Sorin examines how he captured the shifting atmosphere of postwar American culture.

Gerald Sorin is Distinguished Professor of American and Jewish Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His works have won multiple National Jewish Book Awards, and he is author of Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent and Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane.