Bellow, Saul (1915-2005)

Saul Bellow is now a worldwide known writer who became famous with Herzog (1964), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. But it is worth remarking that although he was still of course unknown at the time of his first books, John Cowper Powys, as early as 1948, wrote to his old pal Louis Wilkinson:

The best to my mind of modern American writers is a certain Saul Bellow who has only written 2 books:
1. "Dangling Man" (a title almost worthy of the author of "Forth, Beast" [a novel by Louis Wilkinson])
2. "The Victim", dealing with this sort of funk I suffer from. "The Victim" is a Jew and the sod he is scared of is a New England semi-aristocratic Bum.
(Letters to Louis Wilkinson, September 29th 1948)

John Cowper, at that time in his seventies, was still a passionate and discriminating reader. These books had been published respectively in 1944 and 1947. Dangling Man is a Kafkaesque study of a man waiting to be drafted into the Army. The Victim is about relations between Jews and Gentiles. There is another important link with Powys: Saul Bellow always expressed a profound debt to Theodore Dreiser for his openness to a wide range of experiences and his emotional engagement with it.