An Introduction to Saul Bellow

Bellow has commanded serious critical attention for more than 45 years. By now, he is undoubtedly one of the most written-about fiction writers of the contemporary American period. Since the 1950 scholars have produced over 30 published volumes and over 1,500 scholarly essays attest to his importance. Such interest hinges largely on the fact that no other post-WW II American writer has analyzed so completely and so humanely the effects of American cultural anxiety with the age of technology and rationalism, existentialism, and the legacy of high modernism. 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. From within this space he has tried to restore the integrity of feeling, the meaning of ordinary existence, and the primacy of social contract to a society in which he perceives these things to be in eclipse. Likewise, few writers have explored so thoroughly and humorously the high comedy of heterosexual relations in our age, or the multiple, defeating "masculinities" to which the American male is heir. That he has failed to deal adequately with "femininity" and people of color is a commonplace of recent Bellow criticism and cannot be ignored. However, it is the complexity of this failure which he shares with so many other male writers that should interest us.