Saul Bellow

The most exuberant and funny of all Bellow’s novels, Henderson the Rain King remained the author’s personal favorite. Its outsized hero, Eugene Henderson, a mountain of a man, a millionaire, the father of many, remains adrift. Aggrieved, worn-out, all but defeated he longs to set things straight. Following the …

The Victim is a novel by Saul Bellow published in 1947. As in much of Bellow's fiction, the protagonist is a Jewish man in early middle age. Leventhal lives in New York City. While his wife is away on family business, Leventhal is haunted by an old acquaintance who unjustly claims that Leventhal has been the cause of …

The Dean's December is a 1982 novel by the American author Saul Bellow. The first novel Bellow published after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, it is set in Chicago and Bucharest. The book's main character, Albert Corde, a meditative academic who faces a crisis, accompanies his Romanian-born …

The Closing of the American Mind is a 1987 book by Allan Bloom, who describes "how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students." He focuses especially upon the "openness" of relativism as leading paradoxically to the great "closing" referenced in the book's title. Bloom argues …