The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

Saul Bellow is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American literature. Bellow's work explores the most important cultural and social experiences of his era: the impact of the Holocaust, the urban experience of European immigrants from a Jewish perspective, the fraught failures of the Vietnam War, the ideological seductions of Marxism and Modernism, and the changing attitudes concerning gender and race. This Companion demonstrates the complexity of this formative writer by emphasizing the ways in which Bellow's works speak to the changing conditions of American identity and culture from the post-war period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Individual chapters address the major themes of Bellow's work over more than a half-century of masterfully crafted fiction, articulating some of the most significant cultural experiences of the American twentieth century. It provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of a key figure in American literature.

Chronology; Introduction. Saul Bellow in his times Victoria Aarons; 1. Bellow's early fiction and the making of the Bellovian protagonist Philippe Codde; 2. Seize the Day: Bellow's novel of existential crisis Hilene Flanzbaum; 3. Bellow's breakthrough: The Adventures of Augie March and the novel of voice Steven G. Kellman; 4. Bellow's cityscapes: Chicago and New York Gustavo Sánchez Canales; 5. Bellow and the Holocaust Victoria Aarons; 6. Humboldt's Gift and Bellow's intellectual protagonists S. Lillian Kremer; 7. On being a Jewish writer: Bellow's post-war America and the American Jewish diaspora Alan L. Berger; 8. Bellow and his literary contemporaries Timothy Parrish; 9. Women and gender in Bellow's fiction: Herzog Paule Lévy; 10. Race and cultural politics in Bellow's fiction Martin Urdiales-Shaw; 11. Bellow on Israel: to Jerusalem and back Leona Toker; 12. Bellow's nonfiction: it all adds up Sukhbir Singh; 13. Bellow's short fiction David Brauner; 14. The late Bellow: Ravelstein and the novel of ideas Leah Garrett; Guide to further reading; Index.

Victoria Aarons is the O. R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, Texas. She is the author of A Measure of Memory (1996) and What Happened to Abraham (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book; and the co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2014), and Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (2016). She is co-author of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory and editor of Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, both published in 2016. Aarons has published over seventy scholarly articles and is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Women in Judaism, and Verbeia, Journal of English and Spanish Studies. She serves as a judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.