Saul Bellow Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Dangling Man (1944)
  2. The Victim (1947)
  3. The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
  4. Seize the Day (1956)
  5. Henderson the Rain King (1959)
  6. Herzog (1964)
  7. Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970)
  8. Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
  9. The Dean’s December (1981)
  10. More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
  11. A Theft (1989)
  12. The Actual (1997)
  13. Ravelstein (2000)

Omnibus

  1. Bellow Novels 1944-1953 (2003)

Collections

  1. Mosby’s Memoirs (1968)
  2. The Portable Saul Bellow (1977)
  3. Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
  4. Something to Remember Me By (1991)
  5. Collected Stories (2001)
  6. Bellow: Novels 1970-1982 (2010)

Plays

  1. The Last Analysis (1965)

Novellas

  1. The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
  2. Leaving the Yellow House (2018)

Anthologies edited

  1. Great Jewish Short Stories (1971)
  2. Editors (2001)

Non fiction

  1. Recent American Fiction (1963)
  2. The Frontiers of Knowledge (1975)
  3. To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
  4. Summations (1987)
  5. It All Adds Up (1994)
  6. Conversations With Saul Bellow (1994)
  7. Letters (2010)
  8. Settling My Accounts Before I Go Away (2013)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Saul Bellow Books Overview

The Dangling Man

Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Bellow’s first novel documents Joseph’s psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

The Victim

Bellow’s second novel charts the descent into paranoia of Asa Leventhal, sub editor of a trade magazine. With his wife away visiting her mother, Asa is alone, but not for long. His sister in law summons him to Staten Island to help with his sick nephew. Other demands mount, and readers witness a man losing control.

The Adventures of Augie March

Among the names in the papers in 1953 from Khrushchev to Charlie Chaplin, from Dwight Eisenhower to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth was Saul Bellow’s, whose The Adventures of Augie March attracted enormous attention for its fresh, bold, exhilarating voice and thrust Saul Bellow into the international literary limelight. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, Viking is reissuing Bellow’s landmark novel in a beautiful new hardcover edition, with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. The Adventures of Augie March set the stage for Bellow’s Nobel Prize Award in 1976 and established him as a crucial voice that demanded to be heard. Fifty years later, it remains the best loved of Bellow’s works as new readers discover this vital, truly American masterpiece.

Seize the Day

Fading charmer, Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career a Hollywood agent once placed him as the type that loses the girl’ and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day, he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope.

Henderson the Rain King

Henderson the Rain King, is seriocomic novel by Saul Bellow, first published in 1959. The novel examines the midlife crisis of Eugene Henderson, an unhappy millionaire. The story concerns Henderson’s search for meaning. A larger than life 55 year old who has accumulated money, position, and a large family, he nonetheless feels unfulfilled. He makes a spiritual journey to Africa, where he draws emotional sustenance from experiences with African tribes. Deciding that his true destiny is as a healer, Henderson returns home, planning to enter medical school. A kind of wildly delirious dream made real by the force of Bellow’s rollicking prose and the offbeat inventiveness of his language. Chicago Tribune Bellow s aura of fable is constantly washed over by humor, impulsive creation, and actual, turbulent detail. The Nation

Herzog

Winner of the 1965 National Book Award for Fiction. Herzog is a man seeking balance, trying to regain a foothold on his life. Thrown out of his ex wife’s house after his wife leaves him for his best friend, Herzog retreats to his abandoned home in a remote village in the Berkshire Mountains. Amid the dust of the disused house, he begins scribbling letters to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex presidents, to anyone with whom he feels compelled to set the record straight. The letters which are never sent are a means to cure himself of the psychic strain of the failures of his life: that of being a bad husband, a loving but poor father, an ungrateful child, a distant brother, an egoist to friends, and an apathetic citizen. Primarily a novel of redemption, progressing from ignorance to enlightenment, Herzog is still considered one of the greatest literary expressions of postwar America.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a registrar of madness, a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future moon landings, endless possibilities. His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. Sorry for all and sore at heart, he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings a good life is one in which a person does what is required of him. To know and to meet the terms of the contract was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.

Humboldt’s Gift

Two twentieth century literary masterpieces from the Nobel Prize winnerSaul Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie s life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and he s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.

The Dean’s December

Corde is a Professor of Journalism and Dean of students at a Chicago university. His beautiful wife Minna is an internationally known astronomer. As the book opens the couple are in Eastern Europe. Minna had to migrated to America many years before, but now her mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semicouscious in the local State hospital. As Corde tries to help Minna grapple with an alien bureaucracy, to adapt to life in his mother in law’s small apartment and to cope with her relations and family friends, news filters through to him of problems he has left behind in Chicago. One of his students has been murdered by black criminals; his cousin and his nephew line up against him and try to make him drop the case. A series of articles he is writing for a magazine offends powerful and influential Chicagoans he had thought of as friends. A childhood companion, now a television pundit, shows him unsuspected aspects of his own character. Gradually it becomes clear that Corde’s trip abroad is more than a brief interlude in a calm and orderly life and that nothing for him will ever be the same again. To the familiar Bellow magic and mastery, The Dean’s December adds a new sense of urgency, of topicality, and an almost thriller like tension. The wit, the erudition, the unique and extraordinary use of language will be a delight to admirers of Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift; but the framework in which they are displayed represents a completely new departure.

More Die of Heartbreak

Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of More Die of Heartbreak, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world renowned botanist Benn Crader, self described ‘plant visionary.’ While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from ‘bliss to breakdown.’ Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involving his unusual lady friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out why gifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves ‘knee deep in the garbage of a personal life.’

The Actual

In this superb work of fiction, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow writes comically and wisely about the tenacious claims of first love. Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman, has never belonged anywhere and is as awkward in his human attachments as he is gifted in observing the people around him. But Harry?s observational talents have not gone unnoticed by ?trillionaire? Sigmund Adletsky, who retains Harry as his advisor. Soon the old man discovers Harry?s intense forty year passion for a twice divorced interior designer, Amy Wustrin. At the exhumation and reburial of her husband, Harry is provided, thanks to Sigmund, perhaps the final means for disclosing feelings amassed over a lifetime. Written late in Bellow?s career, The Actual is a maestro?s dissection of the affairs of the heart.

Ravelstein

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent Midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein‘s own surprise he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends old and new, old suits, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies. Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow’s new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny; an elegy to friendship and lives well or badly lived. ‘Simply the best writer we have.’ The New York Times Book Review’No contemporary of ours is more consistently brilliant and more defiantly risky than Saul Bellow.’ Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review’His voice has the meticulous range and certainty of a cathedral choir. The wit is exquisitely mannered; the intelligence both fearless and elegant.’ Boston Globe

Bellow Novels 1944-1953

Saul Bellow’s rare talent has not only earned critical accolades, including the Nobel Prize, it has also made his books perennial bestsellers. Now, in a historic collector’s edition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the classic The Adventures of Augie March, readers will rediscover the novels that laid the foundation for Bellow’s towering career. The comic tour de force The Adventures of Augie March 1953 introduced to American literature a startlingly original expressiveness uninhibited, jazzy, infused with Yiddishisms and Depression era voices. Ebullient irony bears Bellow’s prose aloft. March comes of age in a Chicago bustling with characters as large and vital as the city itself, and his travels abroad lead him through love’s byways and the disappointments of vanishing youth. Martin Amis calls it ‘the Great American Novel’ for its ‘fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity…
. Everything is in here.’ Bellow’s sparer first two novels possess a more Flaubertian precision. Dangling Man 1944 penetrates the psychology of a jobless man’s anxiousness as he awaits draft orders. The Victim 1947, an increasingly nightmarish story of one man’s extraordinary claims on a casual acquaintance, explores our obligations to others and the unfathomable workings of chance. After a half century, Bellow’s earliest novels remain as fresh, incisive, and entertaining as ever. Included in this edition are helpful notes and a chronology of the author’s life.

Mosby’s Memoirs

In six dark tales Saul Bellow presents the human experience in all its presposterousness, poignancy and pathos. It includes ‘Leaving the Yellow House’, ‘The Old System’, ‘Looking for Mr Green’, ‘The Gonzaga Manuscripts’, ‘A Father To Be’ and ‘Mosby’s Memoirs‘.

Him With His Foot in His Mouth

A collection of five short stories by Saul Bellow, including: ‘What Kind of Day Did You Have?’, ‘The Thinker Prince’ and ‘Zetland By a Character Witness’.

Collected Stories

‘Simply the best writer we have.’ The New York Times Book Review Viking’s publication of Saul Bellow’s most recent novel, Ravelstein, was an event that garnered unanimous critical acclaim and placed its author back in the spotlight as one of America’s literary treasures. Now, for the first time ever, here is a collection of shorter works chosen by Bellow himself: favorite stories that follow the arc of his distinguished career. Collected Fiction gathers together stories from Mosby’s Memoirs, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Something to Remember Me By, as well as an early story that to date has appeared only in Esquire magazine. This volume contains a preface by Bellow’s wife, Janis, and an introduction by James Wood and includes celebrated stories such as ‘Leaving the Yellow House’ and ‘What Kind of Day Did You Have?’ and the novella The Bellarosa Connection. Throughout, Bellow’s trademark theme of self awakening, his stunning ability to re create a bygone Chicago, and his unique comic wisdom are magnificently illustrated. This collection is both a handsome anthology Bellow’s avid readers will treasure and a superb introduction to those unacquainted with his genius.

Great Jewish Short Stories

In this wonderfully entertaining collection edited by Nobel Prize winning author Saul Bellow, 28 stories by outstanding Jewish authors capture all the bold color and rich flavor of Jewish culture through the ages. Includes stories by Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bebel, S.J. Agnon, and others. Reissue.

Editors

This rich feast of writing, the fruit of a 50 year journalistic collaboration, features over 80 works of fiction, commentary and essays by some of the finest writers of our period. Most of these works have never been published in book form. A profoundly personal collection from two of our generation’s leading writers.

To Jerusalem and Back

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 brim*ming 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. Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, and served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. To Jerusalem and Back was his first work of non fiction.

It All Adds Up

Saul Bellow’s fiction, honored by a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer, among other awards, has made him a literary giant. Now, in his first nonfiction collection, Bellow’s learned and original mind shines through over four decades of reflections on literature, on the state of the artist in the ‘violent uproar’ of contemporary life, and on life itself, ‘the mysteries of our common human nature.’ Beginning with ‘Mozart: An Overture, ‘ a personal bicentennial tribute to the composer who means so much to Bellow, these carefully selected pieces, illuminated by Bellow’s absolute clarity of language, range from his Nobel Prize lecture of 1976 to ruminations about his beloved city of Chicago, a city, Bellow writes, that ‘builds itself up, knocks itself down again, scrapes away the rubble, and starts over’; to remembrances of passing friends John Cheever, Allan Bloom, Isaac Rosenfeld, John Berryman; to the state of the novel in our time. Along the way, he invokes Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Proust, Conrad, and other masters of the novel to bear the testament of his own life, his conviction of what the novel as a work of art can do for a society benumbed by technology. Also included in this rich collection are pastoral, provocative travel pieces on Spain, Israel, Paris, Tuscany, and other special haunts. And finally, as the chef d’oeuvre, the revealing question and answer piece comprising ‘A Half Life, ‘ and ‘A Second Half Life, ‘ which is as close as we will come to an autobiography from this contemporary master of American fiction.

Conversations With Saul Bellow

For over forty years Saul Bellow has been writing fiction that denounces the destructive forces that have dominated the literature of this century existential nihilism and historicist pessimism. In novel after novel The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humbolt’s Gift, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and others he has tried to restore the integrity of the private life, the value of human feeling, and the primacy of social contract, while proclaiming each individual’s perennial access to age old truths.

In this collection of interviews spanning the period from 1953 to 1991, Bellow elaborates further upon his fictional treatment of these ideas. Here the reader finds the wit and urbane commentary that typify this marvelous writer. He speaks with his interviewers of the changing role of fiction, the literary establishment, and the place of literature in modern life. Since no definitive biography of Bellow has yet been written, these interviews provide valuable insights into the writer that many argue to be the pre eminent American novelist of the post World War II era.

Letters

A never before published collection of Letters an intimate self portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his Letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest Letters are to Bellow’s fellow writers William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, and Wright Morris. Intimate, ironical, richly observant, and funny, these Letters reveal the influcences at work in the man, and illuminate his enduring legacy the novels that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of the world over. Saul Bellow: Letters is a major literary event and an important edition to Bellow’s incomparable body of work.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment