(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary "classics," then write r...
Saul Bellow once referred to his two earliest novels, ‘The Dangling Man’ and ‘The Victim’, as his ‘M.A. and Ph.D’ respectively. It wasn’t until his third novel, ‘Augie March’, that Bellow found his unique literary voice, a sort of sprawling and introspective philosophizing that mixed comedy wit...
Huh — so, the plot of this book, I say to myself, having chosen it at random from Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list, is a rich white guy goes to Africa to learn the meaning of life from the noble savages. Oh, I can see that this will turn out well.Saul Bellow is one of those Big Literary Dudes I've ...
IF I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had fallen under a spell and...
Not that the school is so bad—it has much to recommend it, the students are bright and those that are earnest are terribly earnest in every sense of the term. If you want to teach, Bard is the place for you. But it you want to write also, méfie-toi! [48] The lit. faculty is good. Heinrich Blücher...