APPENDICES
Author’s Biography and Works
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a American writer to win the Foundation's lifetime 1990.
In the words of the Swedish mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His
best-known works include
Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."
ghetto psychoses." Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in "The Dean's December") called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.
In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in after his parents, Lescha (née Gordin) and Abraham Bellows, emigrated from June, although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community, it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth, which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar). Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote:
“The retrospective was strong in me because of my parents. They were both full of the notion that they were falling, falling. They had been prosperous cosmopolitans in Saint Petersburg. My mother could never stop talking about the family working in the kitchen. Cooking, washing, mending... There had been servants in Russia... But you could always transpose from your humiliating condition with the help of a sort of embittered irony.”
an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first rea
When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the novels. Bellow's father, Abraham, was an onion importer. He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger. Bellow's mother, Liza, died when he was 17. He was left with his father and brother Maurice. His mother was deeply religious, and wanted her youngest son, Saul, to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. But he rebelled against what he later called the "suffocating orthodoxy" of his religious upbringing, and he began writing at a young age. Bellow's lifelong love for the reading Chicago, he took part in School on Chicago's west side where he befriended fellow writer
his 1959 novel
on Rosenfeld.
Saul Bellow’s Works 1. Novels and novellas
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2. Short Story Collections
•Mosby's Memoirs (1968)
•Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
•Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)
•Collected Stories (2001)
3. Plays
•The Last Analysis (1965)
•Novels 1944–1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie
March (2003)
•Novels 1956–1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (2007)
•Novels 1970–1982: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, The Dean’s
December (2010)
5. Translations
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6. Non-Fiction
•To Jerusalem and Back
•It All Adds Up (1994) — essay collection
Synopsis of Saul Bellow’s Short Story entitled “Looking for Mr. Green”
George Grebe in his new job of delivering relief checks to disabled people in the black district. Grebe comes from a poor people family.
Grebe’s first interview with his supervisor is interrupted by an uproar in the office caused by the poor woman Staika. She was born in the States to immigrants from the East. She has no other means to support herself and her six children than to donor her blood at hospitals in exchange for money. She came to the relief office to protest. The relief will not pay her electric bill, so she brought her ironing board to the office to use their current. She did not fail to call reporters. She does not lie about her impoverished circumstances, but she follows her own goal by so publishing her suffering. She even seems to enjoy her dramatic performance. Grebe is thankful for his new job and wants to do his best, though his supervisor practically told him that he is neither required nor expected to work very hard. The greatest difficulty in Grebe’s job is finding the people whom the checks are addressed. As a white stranger he is suspicious in the black district where the people would not tell anyone anything. It is a chilly late November day and Grebe cannot find Mr. Tulliver Green. He inquires of a nearby grocer, the janitor of the building where Mr. Green is supposed to live, and several neighbors. He has difficulties in convincing people that he is not a cop or bill collector and that he only wants to deliver check.
are often crowded with as many as twenty people who sometimes even use the beds in shifts. As Grebe learns from an Italian grocer, it is a place where people do all kinds of crimes and abominations without even police being able to stop them from it.
Grebe puts Mr. Green’s check aside and starts looking for Mr. Winston Field instead. He succeeds and finds an old naval in a wheelchair. The man lives in a dark back-yard bungalow with a twelve-year-old boy. He procures a box with papers verifying his identity and his title for the relief money. He misses company, so he tells Grebe his plan how to improve the conditions of black people. He realizes that it is money only that matters, so he suggests creating black millionaires by subscription and contributions. When Grebe leaves him, his shift ends but he cannot go home without delivering one more check, the one for Mr. Green.
