Brings together three of Bellow's works of short fiction--"A theft," "The Bellarosa Connection," and "Something to Remember Me By."

Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism explores Saul Bellow's moral and philosophical affinity with the writers of American transcendentalism, especially Emerson and Whitman. Its focus is on the «vintage» Bellow, or his «mature» novels, from Henderson the Rain King (1959) to The Dean's December (1982). In these novels, Bellow highlights a moral crisis, arising from humankind's despiritualization and dehumanization, which, he believes, is responsible for an ongoing dichotomy in the modern world. Bellow describes this as a dichotomy of the «Cleans» and the «Dirties», in the context of American culture. To rectify this dichotomy and redeem humankind from its current «death-ridden» state, Bellow and his protagonists advance a vision of life that corresponds to the transcendental vision of dialogue and «double consciousness», or coordination and balance. Like Emerson, they advocate, «The mid-world is best... A man is a golden impossibility; the line he must walk is a hair's breadth». Comparable to Whitman, they urge the individual to «knit the knot of contrariety» and act as «an arbiter of the diverse».

When he visited Israel in 1975, Saul Bellow kept an account of his experiences and impressions. It grew into an impassioned and thoughtful book. As he wryly notes, "If you want everyone to love you, don't discuss Israeli politics." But discuss them is very much what he does. Through quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow evokes places, ideas, and people, reaching a sharp picture of contemporary Israel. The reader is offered a wonderful panorama of an ancient and modern world city. Like every other visitor to Israel, Bellow tumbles into "a gale of conversation." He loves it and he makes the reader feel at home. Bellow delights in the liveliness, the gallantry of Israeli life: people on the edge of history, an inch from disaster, yet brimming with argument and words. He delights not in tourist delusions but with a tough critical spirit: his Israel is pocked with scars and creases, and all the more attractive for it. Simply as a travel book, the reader finds remarkable descriptions, such as one in which Bellow finds "the melting air" of Jerusalem pressing upon him "with an almost human weight" Something intelligible is communicated by the earthlike colors of this most beautiful of cities. The impression that Bellow offers is that living in Israel must be as exhausting as it is exciting: a murderous barrage on the nerves. Israel, he writes, "is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort." Jerusalem's people are actively and individually involved in universal history. Bellow makes you share in the experience.

In the first critical study to deal with all of Bellow's fictional works to date, Fuchs gives a unique look at the novelist's imagination at work. Granted sole permission to quote from all of Bellow's unpublished manuscripts and letters, Fuchs studies the stages of Bellow's work, the stages that altered the essential nature of characters and scenes. Analyzing Bellow's literary and cultural milieus, he elucidates his complete vision and shows how this vision manifested itself in revisions. Providing critical readings of individual works, such as Augie March, Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, Fuchs presents critical insights into how the works were composed and how they evolved through numerous drafts. ISBN 0-8223-0503-8 : $35.00.

The world of Saul Bellow is peopled largely by men, often intellectuals, who manifest Bellow's unique conception of American masculinity. In this timely analysis of the Bellow oeuvre from a feminist perspective, Gloria Cronin offers a stunning and insightful critique of the Nobel Prizewinning novelist. Drawing on her comprehensive knowledge of Western thought and Western philosophical tradition, Cronin also incorporates the brilliant insights of French feminist theory on Western male philosophers into her critique. Cronin's mastery of these intellectual traditions informs her fruitful examination of Bellow's explicit dialogue, rich consideration of his "misogyny," and the many masculinities he presents. Cronin demonstrates how Bellow's almost exclusively ma1e protagonists simultaneously search for and destroy a lost feminine essence that they yearn for, and in so doing create their own prisons. She also looks at the self-irony pervading Bellow, the comic dimension of his character's gender struggles, and the spiritual sensibility that attempts to reach beyond gendered and other paradigms of selfhood. A Room of His Own makes an extraordinary contribution to gender studies of masculinity and its formations.