Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an award-winning American author, playwright, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville.^[2]

Early life[link]

DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue.^[3] Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later described how he was "...always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."^[4]

As a teenager, DeLillo wasn't interested in writing until taking a summer job as a parking attendant, where hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit. In a 2010 interview with The Australian, DeLillo reflected on this period by saying "I had a personal golden age of reading, in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time".^[5] Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens.^[6]

After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in Communication Arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he couldn't get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at the agency of Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue at East 48th Street,^[2] writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on “Print ads, very undistinguished accounts...I hadn’t made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when I left,"^[7] in 1964. DeLillo published his first short story, "The River Jordan", in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University, in 1960 and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Discussing the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo said, "I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."^[8] Reflecting in 1993 on his relatively late start in writing fiction, DeLillo said "I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this."^[9]

Works of the 1970s[link]

DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels in eight years between 1971-1978.^[5]

After he quit the advertising industry in 1964, DeLillo began to write his first novel. He later reflected: "...I lived in a very minimal kind of way. My telephone would be $4.20 every month. I was paying a rent of sixty dollars a month. And I was becoming a writer. So in one sense, I was ignoring the movements of the time."^[7] DeLillo's first novel, Americana, was written over the course of four years^[3] and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. Americana concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture".^[3] This novel was later revised by DeLillo in 1989 for paperback re-printing. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, DeLillo admitted "I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published."^[10]

Americana was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy End Zone (1972) and the rock and roll satire Great Jones Street (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "...one of the books I wish I’d done differently. It should be tighter, and probably a little funnier."^[7] In 1975, he married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer.

DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976), took two years to write^[9] and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair describes it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message."^[11] and has been cited by DeLillo as both one of the most difficult books to write^[12] and his personal favorite of his own novels.

Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977) concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as they get involved with a cell of domestic terrorists, and Running Dog (1978), written in a brief four month streak,^[7] was a thriller concerning numerous individuals hunting down a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits.

In 1978, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece.^[5]

Reflecting on his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo remarked, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I was doing more closely. I don't have regrets about that work, but I do think that if I had been a bit less hasty in starting each new book, I might have produced somewhat better work in the 1970s. My first novel took so long and was such an effort that once I was free of it I almost became carefree in a sense and moved right through the decade, stopping, in a way, only at Ratner's Star (1976), which was an enormous challenge for me, and probably a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980s and 90s."^[5] DeLillo has also acknowledged some of the weaknesses of his 1970s works, reflecting in 2007: "I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way."^[7]

Works of the 1980s[link]

The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel Amazons, a mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more light hearted and more evidently commercial novel than his previous and subsequent novels. DeLillo published the novel under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and later requested publishers compiling a bibliography for a reprint of a later novel to expunge the novel from their lists.

While DeLillo spent several years living in Greece,^[13] he took three years^[12] to write The Names (1982), a complex thriller concerning "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East".^[3] While lauded by an increasing number of literary critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside of small academic circles and did not reach a wide readership with this novel. Also in 1982, DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair,^[14] who had first tracked DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979 (on that occasion, DeLillo had handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it.")^[14]

With the publication of his eighth novel White Noise in 1985, DeLillo began a rapid ascendancy to being a noted and respected novelist. White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award for Fiction^[15] and a place among the academic canon of contemporary postmodern novelists. DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the Award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down.^[2][16] The influence and impact of White Noise can be seen in the writing of such authors as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of the novel).^[13]

DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra (1988), a speculative fictionalised take on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. For this novel DeLillo undertook a vast research project, which included reading at least half of the Warren Commission (subsequently DeLillo described as "...the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material."^[9]) Originally written with the working title of either "American Blood" or "Texas School Book," Libra became an international bestseller,^[3] one of five finalists for the National Book Award,^[17] and winner of the next year's Irish Times Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. The novel also elicited fierce critical division, with some critics praising DeLillo's take on the Kennedy assassination while others decried it. George Will, in a Washington Post article,^[18] declared the book to be an affront to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship."^[18]

Works of the 1990s[link]

DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). Clearly influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed upon the author Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of the reclusive writer JD Salinger,^[3] Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, fellow authors John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. He earned a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination for Mao II in 1991 and 1992, respectively.

Following Mao II, DeLillo went to ground and spent several years writing and researching his eleventh novel. Aside from the publication of a folio short story entitled 'Pafko at the Wall' in a 1992 edition of Harpers Magazine, and one short story in 1995, little was seen or heard of him for a number of years.

In 1997, DeLillo finally broke cover with his long awaited eleventh novel, the epic Cold War history Underworld. The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer."^[19] Underworld went on to become DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award^[20] and the New York Times Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel went on to win the 1998 American Book Award, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, and both the William Dean Howells Medal and "Riccardo Bacchelli" International Award in 2000. It was a runner-up in The New York Times' survey of the best American fiction of the last 25 years (announced in May 2006). White Noise and Libra were also recognized by the anonymous jury of contemporary writers.

DeLillo has subsequently expressed surprise at the success of the novel. In 2007, he candidly remarked: "When I finished with Underworld, I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters -- who's going to be interested in that?"^[4] After re-reading it again in 2010, over ten years after its publication, DeLillo commented that re-reading it "...made me wonder whether I would be capable of that kind of writing now — the range and scope of it. There are certain parts of the book where the exuberance, the extravagance, I don’t know, the overindulgence... There are city scenes in New York that seem to transcend reality in a certain way.”^[2]

Works of the 2000s[link]

Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post-Underworld novels have been often viewed by critics as "...disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics",^[16] marking a shift "...away from sweeping, era-defining novels such as "White Noise," "Libra" and "Underworld" to a more "spare and oblique"^[16] style. DeLillo has commented on this shift to shorter novels, saying "“If a longer novel announces itself, I’ll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I tend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I sense is a compact book.”^[2] In a March 2010 interview, it was reported that DeLillo's deliberate stylistic shift had been informed by his having recently re-read several slim but seminal European novels, including Albert Camus's The Stranger, Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene.^[5]

After the publication and extensive publicity drive for Underworld, DeLillo once again retreated from the spotlight to write his twelfth novel, surfacing with The Body Artist in 2001. The novel contained many established DeLillo preoccupations, particularly its interest in performance art and domestic privacies in relation to the wider scope of events. However, the slight and brief novella was very different in style and tone to the epic history of Underworld, and met with a mixed critical reception.

DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis, a modern re-interpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000. This novel was met at the time with a largely negative reception from critics, with several high profile critics and novelists—notably John Updike—voicing their objections to the novel's style and tone. However, subsequently critical opinions have been revised, the novel latterly being seen as prescient for its views on the flaws and weaknesses of the international financial system and cybercapital.

DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.^[21]

DeLillo returned with what would turn out to be his final novel of the decade with Falling Man in May 2007. The novel concerned the impact on one family of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, "...an intimate story which is encompassed by a global event."^[4] According to a 2007 interview in Die Zeit, DeLillo claims that originally he "...didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11." and "...had an idea for a different book" which he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with an idea for the novel, beginning work on the novel following the re-election of George W. Bush that November.^[4] Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle with the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met once again with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards or nominations. DeLillo, however, remained unconcerned by this relative lack of critical acclaim, remarking in 2010 "In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that’s where I belonged. If I’m headed back that way, that’s fine with me, because that’s always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but I’ve always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing.”^[2]

On April 25, 2009 DeLillo received another significant literary award, the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Literature, given by PNC Bank of Delaware.^[22]

On June 9, 2009 it was announced^{[by whom?]} that DeLillo's next novel, his fifteenth, had been completed and was set for publication. Titled Point Omega, the brief plot description released revealed that the new short novel concerns: "A young filmmaker [who] visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man's daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn." The first confirmed extract from Point Omega was made available on the Simon and Schuster website on December 10, 2009.^[23]

On July 24, 2009, Entertainment Weekly announced:

Director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Naked Lunch) will write a screenplay adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis, with "a view to eventually direct,"^[24]

This would be the first direct adaptation for the screen of a DeLillo novel, although both Libra and Underworld have previously been optioned for screen treatments and DeLillo himself has written an original screenplay for the film Game 6. On January 13, 2010, The Canadian Press revealed the latest update on the adaptation:^[25]

Cronenberg...said he's finished writing the big-screen adaptation of Don DeLillo's provocative 2003 novel "Cosmopolis." "Everyone's happy with the script," he said, noting they haven't cast it yet. "It's a project I'm very fond of," added Cronenberg. "It's a terrific book and plans are in the works to make that movie.^[25]

On November 30, 2009, DeLillo published a new original short story in the New Yorker magazine, his first since "Still Life" in 2007 prior to the release of Falling Man. The new story is called "Midnight in Dostoevsky" and it is a standalone short story (not a part of DeLillo's novel Point Omega as seen in the advance copies).^[26]

DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York City Public Library, 5th Ave and 42nd St in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009.^[27]

Works of the 2010s[link]

DeLillo published Point Omega, his fifteenth novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "...the writing of the Jesuit thinker and paleontologist [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin."^[10] The 'Omega Point' of the title "...[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable."^[10] Reviews thus far have been polarised, with some saying the novel is a return to form and innovative, while others have complained about the novel's brevity and apparent lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release, Point Omega spent one week on the New York Times Bestseller List, peaking at #35 on the extended version of the list during its one week stay on the list.^[28]

In a January 29, 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal, DeLillo discussed Point Omega, his views of writing and his plans for the future at great length. When asked about why his recent novels had been shorter, DeLillo replied, "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen."^[10] While DeLillo is open to the idea of returning to the form of the long novel, the interview also revealed that he currently has no interest in doing as many of his literary contemporaries have done and writing a memoir.^[10] DeLillo also made some observations on the state of literature and the challenges facing young writers:

"It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market."^[10]

However, in a February 21, 2010 interview with The Times newspaper, DeLillo re-affirmed his belief in the validity and importance of the novel in a technology and media driven age, offering a more optimistic opinion of the future of the novel than his contemporary Philip Roth had done in a recent interview:

“It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.”^[2]

DeLillo received two further significant literary awards in 2010: the St. Louis Literary Award for his entire body of work to date on October 21, 2010 (previous recipients include Salman Rushdie, E.L. Doctorow, John Updike, William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion and Tennessee Williams);^[29] and his second PEN Award - the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction on October 13, 2010.

DeLillo's first collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, covering short stories published between 1979 and 2011, was published in November 2011.^[30] It has received favorable reviews. New York Times Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger praised it, saying, "DeLillo packs fertile ruminations and potent consolation into each of these rich, dense, concentrated stories."^[31]

Plays[link]

Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, DeLillo has been active as a playwright. To date, DeLillo has written five major plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love Lies Bleeding (2006), and, most recently, The Word For Snow (2007). Stage adaptations have also been written for DeLillo's novel's Libra and Mao II.

Themes and criticism[link]

DeLillo is widely considered by modern critics to be one of the central figures of literary postmodernism. He has said the primary influences on his work and development are "abstract expressionism, foreign films, and jazz."^[32] Many of DeLillo's books (notably White Noise) satirize academia and explore postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence. In several of his novels, DeLillo explores the idea of the increasing visibility and effectiveness of terrorists as societal actors and, consequently, the displacement of what he views to be artists', and particularly novelists', traditional role in facilitating social discourse (Players, Mao II, Falling Man). Another perpetual theme in DeLillo's books is the saturation of mass media and its role in forming simulacra which serve to remove an event from its context and alter or drain its inherent meaning (see the highway shooter in Underworld, the televised disasters longed for in White Noise, the planes in Falling Man, the evolving story of the interviewee in Valparaiso). The psychology of crowds and the capitulation of individuals to group identity is a theme DeLillo examines in several of his novels, especially in the prologue to Underworld, Mao II, and Falling Man. In a 1993 interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo explained

Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace have cited DeLillo as an influence. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time,^[34] along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he questions the classification of DeLillo as a "postmodern novelist." Asked if he approves of this designation, DeLillo has responded: "I don't react. But I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."^[35]

Critics of DeLillo argue that his novels are overly stylized and intellectually shallow. Bruce Bawer famously condemned DeLillo's novels insisting they weren't actually novels at all but "tracts, designed to batter us, again and again, with a single idea: that life in America today is boring, benumbing, dehumanized...It's better, DeLillo seems to say in one novel after another, to be a marauding murderous maniac—and therefore a human—than to sit still for America as it is, with its air conditioners, assembly lines, television sets, supermarkets, synthetic fabrics, and credit cards."^[36] George Will proclaimed the study of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra as "sandbox existentialism" and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship."^[36] DeLillo responded "I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job."^[36] In the same interview DeLillo rejected Will's claim that DeLillo blames America for Lee Harvey Oswald, countering that he instead blamed America for George Will. DeLillo also figured prominently in B. R. Myers' critique of recent American literary fiction, A Reader's Manifesto.

Works[link]

Novels[link]

• Americana (1971)
• End Zone (1972)
• Great Jones Street (1973)
• Ratner's Star (1976)
• Players (1977)
• Running Dog (1978)
• Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell" because of his anonymous collaboration)
• The Names (1982)
• White Noise (1985)
• Libra (1988)
• Mao II (1991)
• Underworld (1997) (see also Pafko at the Wall, the prologue of Underworld which was published separately in Harper's in Oct. 1992)
• The Body Artist (2001)
• Cosmopolis (2003)
• Falling Man (2007)
• Point Omega (2010)

Short Story Collections[link]

• The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011)

Short stories[link]

• The River Jordan (1960) (First published in Epoch 10, No. 2 (Winter 1960), pp. 105–120.)
• Take the "A" Train (1962) (First published in Epoch 12, No. 1 (Spring 1962) pp. 9–25.)
• "Spaghetti and Meatballs" (1965) (First published in Epoch 14, No. 3 (Spring 1965) pp. 244–250)
• "Coming Sun.Mon.Tues." (1966) (First published in Kenyon Review 28, No. 3 (June 1966), pp. 391–394.)
• "Baghdad Towers West" (1967) (First published in Epoch 17, 1968, pp. 195–217.)
• "The Uniforms" (1970) (First published in Carolina Quarterly 22, 1970, pp. 4–11.)
• In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century (1971) (First published in Esquire, Dec. 1971, pp. 174–177, 243, 246.)
• Total Lost Weekend (1972) (First published in Sports Illustrated, Nov. 27, 1972, pp. 98–101+)
• Creation (1979) (First published in Antaeus No. 33, Spring 1979, pp. 32–46.)
• "The Sightings" (1979) (First published in Weekend Magazine (Summer Fiction Issue, out of Toronto), August 4, 1979, pp. 26–30.)
• "Human Moments in World War III" (1983) (First published in Esquire, July 1983, pp. 118–126.)
• "The Ivory Acrobat" (1988) (First published in Granta 25, Autumn 1988, pp. 199–212.)
• "The Runner" (1988) (First published in Harper's, Sept. 1988, pp. 61–63.)
• "Pafko at the Wall" (1992) (First published in Harper's, Oct. 1992, pp. 35–70.)
• "The Angel Esmeralda" (1995) (First published in Esquire, May 1994, pp. 100–109.)
• "Baader-Meinhof" (2002) (First published in New Yorker, 1 April 2002, pp. 78–82.)
• "Still Life" (2007) (First published in New Yorker, April 9, 2007)
• "Midnight in Dostoevsky" (2009) (First Published in New Yorker, November 30, 2009)
• "The Border of Fallen Bodies" (2009) (First Published in Esquire, April 21, 2009)
• Hammer and Sickle (2010) (First published in Harper's, Dec. 2010, pp. 63–74)

Plays[link]

• The Engineer of Moonlight (1979)
• The Day Room (first production 1986)
• Valparaiso (first production 1999)
• Love-Lies-Bleeding (first production 2005)
• The Word for Snow (first production in 2007)

Screenplays[link]

• Game 6 (2005), the story of a playwright (played by Michael Keaton) and his obsession with the Boston Red Sox and the 1986 World Series, was written in the early 1990s, but wasn't produced until 2005, ironically one year after the Red Sox won their first World Series title in 86 years. To date, it is DeLillo's only work for film.

Significant essays[link]

• "American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK" (1983) (Published in Rolling Stone, Dec. 8, 1983. DeLillo's first major published essay. Seen as signposting his interest in the JFK assassination that would ultimately lead to Libra)
• "Salman Rushdie Defense" (1994) (Co-written with Paul Auster in defense of Salman Rushdie following the announcement of a fatwa upon him after the publication of The Satanic Verses)
• "The Artist Naked in a Cage" (1997)(A short piece ran in The New Yorker on May 26, 1997, pages 6–7. An address delivered on May 13, 1997 at the New York Public Library's event "Stand In for Wei Jingsheng.")
• "The Power of History" (1997) (Published in the Sept. 7, 1997 issue of the New York Times Magazine. Preceded the publication of Underworld and was viewed by many as a rationale for the novel)
• "A History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (1999) (This piece is the acceptance address given by DeLillo on the occasion of being awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1999. A small pamphlet was printed with this address, an address by Scribner editor-in-chief Nan Graham, the Jury's Citation and an address by Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. It was reprinted in a German translation in Die Zeit in 2001. The piece is in five numbered sections, and is about five pages long.)
• "In the Ruins of the Future" (Dec 2001) (This short essay appeared in Harper's magazine, December 2001 issue, pages 33–40. It concerns the Sept 11 incidents, terrorism, and America. It consists of eight numbered sections.)

Books about DeLillo[link]

• Bloom, Harold (ed.), Don DeLillo (Bloom's Major Novelists), Chelsea House, 2003.
• Boxall, Peter, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, Routledge, 2006.
• Civello, Paul, American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, University of Georgia Press, 1994.
• Cowart, David, Don DeLillo - The Physics of Language, University of Georgia Press, 2002.
• Dewey, Joseph, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo, University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
• Dewey, Joseph (ed.), Kellman, Steven G. (ed.), Malin, Irving (ed.), Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld, University of Delaware Press, 2002.
• Duvall, John, Don DeLillo's Underworld: A Reader's Guide, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002.
• Duvall, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, Cambridge UP, 2008
• Engles, Tim (ed.), Duvall, John (ed.), Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise, Modern Language Association Press, 2006.
• Giaimo, Paul. "Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of A Writer's Work", 2011.
• Halldorson, Stephanie, The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo, 2007.
• Hantke, Steffen, Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy, Peter Lang Publishing, 1994.
• Kavadlo, Jesse, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief, Peter Lang Publishing, 2004.
• Keesey, Douglas, Don DeLillo, Macmillan, 1993.
• Laist, Randy, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels, Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.
• LeClair, Tom In the Loop - Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
• Lentricchia, Frank (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, Duke University Press, 1991.
• Lentricchia, Frank (ed.), New Essays on White Noise, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Martucci, Elise, The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo, Routledge, 2007.
• Morley, Catherine, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.
• Orr, Leonard, White Noise: A Reader's Guide Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.
• Osteen, Mark American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
• Ruppersburg, Hugh (ed.), Engles, Tim (ed.), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, G.K. Hall, 2000.
• Schuster, Marc "Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum", Cambria Press, 2008
• Weinstein, Arnold, Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction From Hawthorne to DeLillo, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Awards and award nominations[link]

• 1979 - DeLillo awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
• 1984 - Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
• 1985 - National Book Award (Fiction) for White Noise^[15]
• 1985 - National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1985) for White Noise
• 1988 - National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1988) for Libra
• 1988 - New York Times Best Books of the Year (1988) for Libra
• 1988 - National Book Award finalist (Fiction) for Libra^[17]
• 1989 - Irish Times, Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for Libra
• 1991 - 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II
• 1992 - 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for Mao II
• 1995 - 1995 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award
• 1997 - National Book Award finalist (Fiction) for Underworld^[20]
• 1997 - New York Times Best Books of the Year nominee for Underworld
• 1998 - 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for Underworld
• 1998 - 1998 American Book Award for Underworld
• 1999 - 1999 Jersalem Prize awarded for Underworld
• 2000 - 2000 William Dean Howells Medal awarded for Underworld
• 2000 - 2000 "Riccardo Bacchelli" International Award for Underworld
• 2001 - James Tait Black Memorial Prize shortlist (Fiction, 2001) for The Body Artist
• 2006 - 2006 New York Times: Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years (Runner-Up) for Underworld
• 2007 - 2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Fiction and Poetry) for Falling Man
• 2007 - 2007 Booklist Top of the List: A Best of Editors Choice for Falling Man
• 2009 - 2009 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for achievements in literature
• 2010 - 2010 St Louis Literary Award
• 2010 - 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction^[37]

References in popular culture[link]

• Paul Auster dedicated his books In the Country of Last Things and Leviathan to his friend Don DeLillo.
• Ryan Boudinot [2] and Neal Pollack^[38] contributed humor pieces to the journal McSweeney's satirizing DeLillo.
• A fictionalized DeLillo blogs for The Onion.^[39]
• Conor Oberst begins his song "Gold Mine Gutted" with "It was Don DeLillo, whiskey, me, and a blinking midnight clock."
• Rhett Miller references Libra in his song "World Inside a World" saying, "I read it in DeLillo, like he'd written it for me." The phrase, "There is a world inside the world", appears multiple times in the book.
• The band The Airborne Toxic Event takes its name from a chemical gas leak of the same name in DeLillo's White Noise.
• Too Much Joy's song "Sort of Haunted House" from Mutiny is inspired by DeLillo; similarly, Too Much Joy spin-off band, Wonderlick, takes its name from an intentional misspelling of the name of the protagonist from Great Jones Street.
• David Foster Wallace claimed DeLillo, and Cynthia Ozick, as two of the greatest living writers of the English language.
• In the 2009 film The Proposal, the Canadian-born editor in chief of a New York publisher risks deportation to meet DeLillo at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Don DeLillo

• DeLillo 'Featured Authors' page at NY Times
• DeLillo Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• Literary Encyclopedia Biography
• Works by or about Don DeLillo in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Don DeLillo's America website focused on Don DeLillo's work since 1996
• Don DeLillo Bibliography listing all work by DeLillo, including interviews, profiles, blurbs and other miscellaneous DeLillo writings
• Jacobs, Timothy. “Don DeLillo.” Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Peter Knight. Oxford: ABC-CLIO Press, 2003. 219-220.
• Don DeLillo interview with Granta Magazine

The Falling Man is a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41:15 a.m. during the September 11 attacks in New York City. The subject of the image—whose identity remains uncertain but is speculated to be that of Jonathan Briley, who worked in a top-floor restaurant—was one of the people trapped on the upper floors of the skyscraper who apparently either fell as they searched for safety or jumped to escape the fire and smoke. At least 200 people fell or jumped to their deaths that day;^[1] there was no time to recover or identify those who were forced out of the buildings prior to the collapse of the towers. Officially, all deaths in the attacks except those of the hijackers were ruled to be homicides due to blunt trauma^[2] (as opposed to suicides), and the New York City medical examiner's office stated that it does not classify the people who fell to their deaths on September 11 as "jumpers": "A 'jumper' is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide... These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out."^[1]

The photograph, shown on the right gives the impression that the man is falling straight down. However, this is one in a series of photographs of his fall, and viewed with the others it is evident that he is tumbling through the air.^[3]

The photographer has noted that, in at least two cases, newspaper stories commenting on the image have attracted a barrage of criticism from readers who found the image "disturbing."^[4] Regarding the social and cultural significance of The Falling Man, theologian Mark D. Thompson of Moore Theological College says that "perhaps the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not found in art, or literature, or even popular music. It is found in a single photograph."^[5]

Publication history[link]

The photograph initially appeared in newspapers around the world, including on page 7 of The New York Times on September 12, 2001. It appeared only once in the Times because of criticism and anger against its use. ^[6] Six years later, it appeared on page 1 of the New York Times Book Review on May 27, 2007.^[7]

"The Falling Man" is also the title of an article about the photograph by Tom Junod that appeared in the September 2003 issue of Esquire magazine and was later made into a documentary film. The article and film reveal who "The Falling Man" actually may have been: Jonathan Briley. Briley worked on the 106th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. It was there, in the restaurant, that he either fell accidentally while searching for fresh air and safety or decided to jump. He was an asthmatic and would have known he was in danger when smoke began to pour into the restaurant.^[8]

Identification[link]

The identity of the subject of The Falling Man has never been confirmed. The fact that so many people were trapped in the tower has made identifying the man in the 12 photos difficult. It is thought that at least 200 people fell to their deaths, though the actual number is not certain.^[1]

The faller was initially suggested by The Globe and Mail reporter Peter Cheney to be Norberto Hernandez, but upon closer examination of the entire photo sequence it was felt by his family that it was clearly not Hernandez. Three other families claimed him to be a relative, but careful analysis of the photo confirmed the claims to be incorrect.

Finally, The Falling Man was identified by chef Michael Lomonaco as Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old employee of the Windows on the World restaurant. Briley was a sound engineer who lived in Mount Vernon, New York and worked in the North Tower restaurant.^[9] The victim was initially identified by his brother, Timothy.^[8] Lomonaco claims that he was able to identify Briley by his clothes and body-type. In one of the pictures, The Falling Man's clothes were blown away, revealing an orange undershirt similar to the shirt that Briley wore to work almost every day. His older sister, Gwendolyn, asserted he was wearing that shirt on the day of the attack. She told reporters of The Sunday Mirror, "When I first looked at the picture...and I saw it was a man - tall, slim - I said, 'If I didn't know any better, that could be Jonathan.'" A charity has been set up for Briley's family, and many news programs have aired his story as being the one of The Falling Man. Another of Briley's brothers, Alex, was an original member of the 1970s disco group Village People.

Documentary film[link]

9/11: The Falling Man is a 2006 documentary film about the picture and the story behind it.^[10] It was made by American filmmaker Henry Singer and filmed by Richard Numeroff, a New York-based director of photography. The film is loosely based on Junod's Esquire story. It also drew its material from photographer Lyle Owerko's pictures of falling people. It debuted on March 16, 2006, on the British television network Channel 4. It later made its North American premiere on Canada's CBC Newsworld on September 6, 2006, and has been broadcast in over 30 countries. The U.S. premiere was September 10, 2007, on the Discovery Times Channel.

Use in literature[link]

The picture plays an important part in the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. The last 15 pages of his text comprise a flip-book collection of images of a similar man shot by photographer Lyle Owerko falling upwards toward the top of the World Trade Center. Although he is not the first to make the claim, Foer demonstrates how the falling man is used as a symbol for grieving families much like the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

Falling Man, a novel by Don DeLillo, is about the events of 9/11. The Falling Man in the novel is a performance artist recreating the events of the photograph.^[11] DeLillo says he was unfamiliar with the title of the picture when he named his book. The artist straps himself into a harness and jumps from an elevated structure in a high visibility area (such as a highway overpass), hanging in the pose of the falling man.

The Falling Man is also referenced in the poem "Out of the Blue" by Simon Armitage. The poem is written from the falling man's point of view as he falls.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• 9/11: The Falling Man (March 16, 2006). Channel 4.

Further reading[link]

• Friend, David (2007). "Thursday, September 13". Watching The World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11. I.B.Tauris. pp. 106–163. ISBN 1-84511-545-7. 
• Ingledew, John (2005). Photography. Laurence King Publishing. p. 76. ISBN 1-85669-432-1. 
• Tallack, Douglas (2005). New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York. Berg Publishers. pp. 174–181. ISBN 1-84520-170-1. 

External links[link]

• NPR interview with Esquire magazine writer Tom Junod, August 21, 2003

Paul Auster
Auster at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	Paul Benjamin Auster (1947-02-03) February 3, 1947 (age 65) Newark, NJ, United States
Pen name	Paul Queen [1] Paul Benjamin
Occupation	Novelist and poet
Nationality	American
Period	1974 – present
Genres	Absurdist fiction, crime fiction, mystery fiction
Literary movement	Postmodernism
Influences Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, James Joyce, Maurice Blanchot, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Dashiell Hammett, Knut Hamsun, Charles Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida,[2] Jabès[3]
Influenced Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Jason Thornberry, Christopher Moore, Bill Bryson, Steven Wright, Steven Hall, Hideo Kojima

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).

Biography[link]

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey,^[4] to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent, Queenie and Samuel Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey ^[5] and was graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.^[6] After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.^[4] Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer, Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel Auster.

He is also the vice-president of PEN American Center.

In 2012, Auster was quoted as saying in an interview that he wouldn't visit Turkey to protest their treatment of journalists. The Turkish Prime-Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Auster: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?".^[7] "According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world", responded Auster.^[8]

Writing[link]

Auster greeting Israeli President Shimon Peres with Salman Rushdie and Caro Llewellyn in 2008

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."^[9]

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

Themes[link]

According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle nineteenth century, exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses, but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious also is structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling that something is missing. This is the sense of being outside language. The world can only be constructed through language, but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be told or be thought of, it may only be sensed. This is one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.

Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel de Certeau - although Auster has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable'.[3]

The transcendentalists believe that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - as Thoreau did in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.

The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings.^[10] Auster's protagonists often are writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing and they try to find their place within the natural order, to be able to live within "civilization" again.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Auster's work (such as William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy), Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.

Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:^[11]

• coincidence
• frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
• a sense of imminent disaster
• an obsessive writer as central character or narrator
• loss of the ability to understand
• loss of language
• depiction of daily and ordinary life
• failure ^[12]
• absence of a father
• writing and story telling, metafiction
• intertextuality
• American history
• American space

Coincidence[link]

Instances of coincidence may be found throughout Auster's work.^{[citation needed]} Auster claims that people are so influenced by the continuity among them that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency, and contradiction in their own lives:

Failure[link]

Failure, in Paul Auster's works, is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it comes from the individual's uncertainty about the status of one's own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they also are able to regain contact with their surroundings. A similar development also may be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.

Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.

Identity/Subjectivity[link]

Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: they sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry, and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this state of "nothingness" they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.

Reception[link]

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature."^[15] Dirda also has extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots — drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit, and autobiography — keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.^[16]

Literary critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:

What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.^[17]

Auster with John Ashbery at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Awards[link]

• 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère for The New York Trilogy
• 1990 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance
• 1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan
• 1996 Bodil Awards - Best American Film: Smoke
• 1996 Independent Spirit Award - Best First Screenplay: Smoke
• 1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
• 2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[18]
• 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (received in previous years by Günter Grass, Arthur Miller, and Mario Vargas Llosa)
• 2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature
• 2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège
• 2007 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres ^[19]
• 2010 Médaille Grand Vermeil de la ville de Paris ^[20]

Published works[link]

Fiction[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paul Auster

• Squeeze Play (1982) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)
• The New York Trilogy (1987)
  • City of Glass (1985)
  • Ghosts (1986)
  • The Locked Room (1986)
• In the Country of Last Things (1987)
• Moon Palace (1989)
• The Music of Chance (1990)
• Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)
• Leviathan (1992)
• Mr. Vertigo (1994)
• Timbuktu (1999)
• The Book of Illusions (2002)
• Oracle Night (2003)
• The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
• Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)
• Man in the Dark (2008) ^[21]
• Invisible (2009) ^[22]
• Sunset Park (2010)^[23]

Poetry[link]

• Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988)
• Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979 (1991)
• Collected Poems (2007)

Screenplays[link]

• The Music of Chance (film) (1993)
• Smoke (1995)
• Blue in the Face (1995)
• Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
• The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) – "The Inner Life of Martin Frost" is a screenplay that is mentioned in Auster's novel The Book of Illusions. It is the only film that the protagonist watches of Hector Mann's later, hidden films. It is a simple story of a man meeting a girl, an intense relationship, and her vanishing.

Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies[link]

• The Invention of Solitude (1982)
• The Art of Hunger (1992)
• The Red Notebook (1995) (The Red Notebook was originally printed in Granta (44)). (1993).
• Hand to Mouth (1997)
• Collected Prose (contains The Invention of Solitude, The Art of Hunger, The Red Notebook, and Hand to Mouth as well as various other previously uncollected pieces) (first edition, 2005; expanded second edition, 2010)
• Winter Journal (2012)

Edited collections[link]

• The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1982) ^[24]
• True Tales of American Life (First published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project) (2001)

Translations[link]

• "The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of Andre du Bouchet" (1976)
• Life/Situations, by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1977 (in collaboration with Lydia Davis)
• A Tomb for Anatole, by Stéphane Mallarmé (1983)
• Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1998) (translation of Pierre Clastres' ethnography Chronique des indiens Guayaki)
• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (2005)
• Vicious Circles: Two fictions & "After the Fact", by Maurice Blanchot, 1999

Miscellaneous[link]

• The Story of My Typewriter with paintings by Sam Messer (2002)
• "The Accidental Rebel" (Wed. April 23 article in New York Times)

Other media[link]

• On the album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein.

• In 2005 his daughter, Sophie, recorded an album of songs in both French and English, entitled Sophie Auster, with the band One Ring Zero. The lyrics of three of the songs (in English) are by Paul Auster; and he also provided for the accompanying booklet translations of several French poems which form the lyrics of other songs on the album.

• In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released. Auster features in a cameo role at the end of the film.

• In 1994 City of Glass was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.

• Jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler's album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.

• Paul Auster's voice may be heard on the 2005 album entitled We Must Be Losing It by The Farangs. The two tracks are entitled "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".

• In 2006 Paul Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, based on an original screenplay by him. It was shot in Lisbon and Azenhas do Mar and starred David Thewlis, Iréne Jacob, and Michael Imperioli as well as Auster's daughter Sophie. Auster provided the narration, albeit uncredited. The film premiered at the European Film Market, as part of the 2007 Berlinale in Berlin, Germany on February 10, 2007, and opened in New York City on September 7 of the same year.

• The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song Put A Penny In The Slot mention Auster and his novella Timbuktu.

• Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition ... ce qui arrive ... (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster with ensemble music and live electronics by Markus Noisternig and Thomas Musil (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM)). Paul Auster is heard reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook, either as straight recitation, integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play, or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble. A film by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.

• Paul Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk ^[25] and produced by NPR,^[26] which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio, (2005),^[27] and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work, (2005).^[28]

• In the 2008 Russian film Плюс один (Plus One), the main character is in the process of translating one of Auster's books.

• In the 2009 documentary "Act of God", Auster is interviewed on his experience of being struck by lightning as a boy.

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• Paul is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster.

References[link]

• Dirda, Michael. "Spellbound." The New York Review of Books, 4 December 2008.
• —. "Strange things begin to happen when a writer buys a new notebook". The Washington Post, 21 December 2003.

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• Paul Auster, Gérard de Cortanze La solitude du labyrinthe. Paris:Actes Sud, 1997.
• Franchot Ballinger Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster. MELUS, 17 (1991–92), pp. 21–38.
• Dennis Barone (ed.): Beyond the Red Notebook. Essays on Paul Auster. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2. ed. 1996)
• Dennis Barone Auster’s Memory. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 32–34
• Charles Baxter The Bureau of Missing Persons: Notes on Paul Auster’s Fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 40–43.
• Harold Bloom ed. Paul Auster. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publ.; 2004.
• Martine Chard-Hutchinson Paul Auster (1947- ). In: Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (eds.). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 13–20.
• Alain Chareyre-Méjan, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert. Ce que Paul Auster n’a jamais dit: une logique du quelconque. In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L’oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 176–184.
• Gérard de Cortanze, James Rudnick: Paul Auster's New York. Gerstenberg, New York; Hildesheim, 1998
• (French) Gérard de Cortanze Le New York de Paul Auster. Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne-Hachette Livre, 1996.
• Robert Creeley Austerities. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 35–39.
• Scott Dimovitz, 'Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.' MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. 52:3 (Fall 2006): 613-633.
• Scott Dimovitz, 'Portraits in Absentia: Repetition, Compulsion, and the Postmodern Uncanny in Paul Auster's Leviathan.' Studies in the Novel. 40:4 (Winter 2008): 447-464.
• William Drenttel (ed.) Paul Auster: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Checklist of Published Works 1968-1994. New York: Delos Press, 1994.
• (German)Sven Gächter Schreiben ist eine endlose Therapie: Der amerikanische Romancier Paul Auster über das allmähliche Entstehen von Geschichten. Weltwoche (31.12.1992), p. 30.
• François Gavillon Paul Auster, gravité et légèreté de l'écriture. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.
• Charles Grandjeat Le hasard et la nécessité dans l’oeuvre de Paul Auster. In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L’oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 153–163.
• (German) Ulrich Greiner: Gelobtes Land. Amerikanische Schriftsteller über Amerika. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1997
• Claude Grimal Paul Auster au coeur des labyrinthes. Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, 68:733 (1990), pp. 64–66.
• Allan Gurganus How Do You Introduce Paul Auster in Three Minutes?. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 7–8.
• Anne M. Holzapfel: The New York trilogy. Whodunit? Tracking the structure of Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996. (= Studien zur Germanistik und Anglistik; 11) ISBN 3-631-49798-9
• (German) Beate Hötger: Identität im filmischen Werk von Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2002. (= Europäische Hochschulschriften; Reihe 30, 84) ISBN 3-631-38470-X
• (German) Heiko Jakubzik: Paul Auster und die Klassiker der American Renaissance. Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg 1999 (online text)
• Bernd Herzogenrath An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 1999
• Bernd Herzogenrath Introduction. In: Bernd Herzogenrath. An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 1–11.
• Gerald Howard Publishing Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 92–95.
• Peter Kirkegaard, Cities, Signs, Meanings in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster: Or, Never Sure of Any of It in Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48 (1993): 161179.
• Barry Lewis The Strange Case of Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 53–61.
• James Marcus Auster! Auster!. The Village Voice, 39 (August 30, 1994), pp. 55–56.
• Brian McHale Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Patricia Merivale The Austerized Version. Contemporary Literature, 38:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 185–197.
• Christophe Metress Iles et archipels, sauver ce qui est récupérable: la fiction de Paul Auster. In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L’oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 245–257.
• James Peacock Carrying the Burden of Representation: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions. Journal of American Studies, 40:1 (April 2006), pp. 53–70.
• (German) Werner Reinhart: Pikareske Romane der 80er Jahre. Ronald Reagan und die Renaissance des politischen Erzählens in den USA. (Acker, Auster, Boyle, Irving, Kennedy, Pynchon). Narr, Tübingen 2001
• William Riggan Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
• Mark Rudman Paul Auster: Some ‚Elective Affinities‘. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 44–45.
• (German) Michael Rutschky Die Erfindung der Einsamkeit: Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Paul Auster. Merkur, 45 (1991), pp. 1105–1113.
• Edward H. Schafer Ways of Looking at the Moon Palace. Asia Major. 1988; 1(1):1-13.
• (German) Steffen Sielaff: Die postmoderne Odyssee. Raum und Subjekt in den Romanen von Paul Auster. Univ. Diss., Berlin 2004.
• (German) Joseph C. Schöpp Ausbruch aus der Mimesis: Der amerikanische Roman im Zeichen der Postmoderne. München: Fink, 1990.
• Motoyuki Shibata Being Paul Auster’s Ghost. In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 183–188.
• Carsten Springer: Crises. The works of Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2001. (= American culture; 1) ISBN 3-631-37487-9
• Carsten Springer: A Paul Auster Sourcebook. Frankfurt a. Main u. a., Peter Lang, 2001.
• Eduardo Urbina: La ficción que no cesa: Paul Auster y Cervantes. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007.
• Eduardo Urbina: La ficción que no cesa: Cervantes y Paul Auster. Cervantes en el ámbito anglosajón. Eds. Diego Martínez Torrón and Bernd Dietz. Madrid: SIAL Ediciones, 2005. 433-42.
• Eduardo Urbina: Reflejos lunares, o la transformación paródica de la locura quijotesca en Moon Palace (1989) de Paul Auster. Siglos dorados; Homenaje a Augustin Redondo. Ed. Pierre Civil. Madrid: Castalia, 2004. 2: 1417-25.
• Eduardo Urbina: Parodias cervantinas: el Quijote en tres novelas de Paul Auster (La ciudad de cristal, El palacio de la luna y El libro de las ilusiones). ‘Calamo currente’: Homenaje a Juan Bautista de Avalle Arce. Ed. Miguel Zugasti. RILCE (Universidad de Navarra) 23.1 (2007): 245-56.
• Eduardo Urbina: Reading Matters: Quixotic Fiction and Subversive Discourse in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions Critical Reflections: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature in Honor of James A. Parr. Eds. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 57-66.
• Various Authors. Special edition on Paul Auster. Critique. 1998 Spring; 39(3).
• Aliki Varvogli "World That is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction". Liverpool University press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-85323-697-9
• Florian Felix Weyh Paul Auster. Kritisches Lexikon der fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (26. Nachlieferung), pp. 1–10.
• Curtis White The Auster Instance: A Ficto-Biography. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 26–29.
• Eric Wirth A Look Back from the Horizon. In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 171–182.
• John Zilcosky The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory. Critique, 39:3 (Spring 1998), pp. 195–206.

External links[link]

• 'The Searcher', interview with The Guardian in May 1999
• 'An Interview with Paul Auster', interview with 3:AM Magazine in November 2001
• 'Dem old Bush blues', interview with The Times in April 2004
• 'The Tyrannies and Epiphanies of Chance', interview in the Oxonian Review in June 2004
• 'Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt in conversation' at the Key West Literary Seminar in September 2007 (audio)
• George Dunford interviews Paul Auster, interview with Cordite Poetry Review in August 2008
• 'Interview: Paul Auster on His Newest Novel, Man in the Dark', interview with Village Voice in September 2008
• Interview with Auster, discussing Man in the Dark with George Miller in November 2008 (audio)
• 'The mechanics of reality', discussion between Paul Auster and school students in January 2009 (includes audio)
• I want to tell you a story piece by Auster at The Guardian, November 6, 2006. The subtitle reads: "one of America's greatest living novelists, argues that fiction is 'magnificently useless', but the act of creation and the pleasure of reading are incomparable human joys that we should savour"
• Paul Auster: Bio, excerpts, interviews and articles in the archives of the Prague Writers' Festival
• 'Dossier - The Brooklyn Follies', a collection of essays on Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies (English and French), on La Clé des Langues
• Paul Auster at the Internet Movie Database
• Paul Auster presents Winter journal in Barcelona and talks about Mexico, Turkey, Iran and Occupy Wall Street movement, very interesting, book channel Canal-L

Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow at the Miami Book Fair International of 1990
Born	Solomon Bellow (1915-06-10)June 10, 1915 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died	April 5, 2005(2005-04-05) (aged 89) Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Canadian/American
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	University of Chicago Northwestern University University of Wisconsin-Madison
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1976 National Medal of Arts 1988 National Book Award 1954, 1965, 1971
Influences The Bible, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Rudolf Steiner[1]
Influenced Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Julian Barnes, John Berryman, Dave Eggers

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.^[2] He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times^[3] and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.^[4]

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the 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."^[5] His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."^[6]

Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of "Henderson the Rain King," was the one most like himself.^[7] Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a "thick-necked" rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." ^[8] 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 Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.

In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

Early life[link]

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellow^[9] in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia. Bellow celebrated his birthday in 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).^[10] Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote:

A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, the city that was to form the backdrop of many of his novels.^[9] Bellow's father, Abraham, was an onion importer. He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger.^[9] 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.^[9] Bellow's lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. Bellow also grew up reading William Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century.^[9] In Chicago, he took part in anthroposophical studies. Bellow attended Tuley High School on Chicago's west side where he befriended fellow writer Isaac Rosenfeld. In his 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King, Bellow modeled the character King Dahfu on Rosenfeld.^[12]

Education and early career[link]

Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University. He originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department to be anti-Jewish; instead, he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology.^[13] It has been suggested Bellow's study of anthropology had an interesting influence on his literary style, and anthropological references pepper his works.^{[citation needed]} Bellow later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom (see Ravelstein), John Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air."^[14]

In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration Writer's Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. Most of the writers were radical: if they were not card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause. Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning writers he had to suffer their taunts.^[15]

In 1941 Bellow became a naturalized US citizen.^[16] In 1943, Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.

During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.

From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, living on Commonwealth Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota.^[17]

In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writing The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Critics have remarked on the resemblance between Bellow's picaresque novel and the great 17th Century Spanish classic Don Quixote. The book starts with one of American literature's most famous opening paragraphs, and it follows its titular character through a series of careers and encounters, as he lives by his wits and his resolve. Written in a colloquial yet philosophical style, The Adventures of Augie March established Bellow's reputation as a major author.

In the late 1950s he taught creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. One of his students was William Kennedy, who was encouraged by Bellow to write fiction.

Return to Chicago[link]

Bellow lived in New York City for a number of years, but he returned to Chicago in 1962 as a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The committee's goal was to have professors work closely with talented graduate students on a multi-disciplinary approach to learning. Bellow taught on the committee for more than 30 years, alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom.

There were also other reasons for Bellow's return to Chicago, where he moved into the Hyde Park neighborhood with his third wife, Susan Glassman. Bellow found Chicago to be vulgar but vital, and more representative of America than New York.^[18] He was able to stay in contact with old high school friends and a broad cross-section of society. In a 1982 profile, Bellow's neighborhood was described as a high-crime area in the city's center, and Bellow maintained he had to live in such a place as a writer and "stick to his guns."^[19]

Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novel Herzog. Bellow was surprised at the commercial success of this cerebral novel about a middle-aged and troubled college professor who writes letters to friends, scholars and the dead, but never sends them. Bellow returned to his exploration of mental instability, and its relationship to genius, in his 1975 novel Humboldt's Gift. Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, as his model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher.^[20] Bellow also used Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, anthroposophy, as a theme in the book, having attended a study group in Chicago. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969.^[21]

Nobel Prize[link]

Saul Bellow (left) with Keith Botsford ca 1992

Propelled by the success of Humboldt's Gift, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976. In the 70-minute address he gave to an audience in Stockholm, Sweden, Bellow called on writers to be beacons for civilization and awaken it from intellectual torpor.^[20]

The following year, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Bellow for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Bellow's lecture was entitled "The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over."^[22]

Bellow traveled widely throughout his life, mainly to Europe, which he sometimes visited twice a year.^[20] As a young man, Bellow went to Mexico City to meet Leon Trotsky, but the expatriate Russian revolutionary was assassinated the day before they were to meet. Bellow's social contacts were wide and varied. He tagged along with Robert F. Kennedy for a magazine profile he never wrote, he was close friends with the author Ralph Ellison. His many friends included the journalist Sydney J. Harris and the poet John Berryman.^{[citation needed]}

While sales of Bellow's first few novels were modest, that turned around with Herzog. Bellow continued teaching well into his old age, enjoying its human interaction and exchange of ideas. He taught at Yale University, University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton University, University of Puerto Rico, University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University, where he co-taught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss Seize the Day). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow moved in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Bellow was married five times, with all but his last marriage ending in divorce. His son by his second marriage, Adam, published a nonfiction book In Praise of Nepotism in 2003. Bellow's wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea and Janis Freedman. In 1999, when he was 84, Bellow had a daughter, his fourth child, with Freedman.

While he read voluminously, Bellow also played the violin and followed sports. Work was a constant for him, but he at times toiled at a plodding pace on his novels, frustrating the publishing company.^[20]

His early works earned him the reputation as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century, and by his death he was widely regarded to be one of the greatest living novelists.^[23] He was the first writer to win three National Book Awards in all award categories.^[3] His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists — William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in The New Republic, wrote:^[24]

Themes and style[link]

The author's works speak to the disorienting nature of modern civilization, and the countervailing ability of humans to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness (or at least awareness). Bellow saw many flaws in modern civilization, and its ability to foster madness, materialism and misleading knowledge.^[25] Principal characters in Bellow's fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.

Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a "Jewish writer." Bellow's work also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.

Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust and Henry James, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes.^[9] Bellow interspersed autobiographical elements into his fiction, and many of his principal characters were said to bear a resemblance to him.

Criticism, controversy and conservative cultural activism[link]

Martin Amis described Bellow as "The greatest American author ever, in my view".^[26]

For Linda Grant, "what Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive."

On the other hand, Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the 19th century European novel. In a private letter, Vladimir Nabokov once referred to Bellow as a "miserable mediocrity."^[29] Journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum described Bellow's Ravelstein (2000) as the only book that rose above Bellow's failings as an author. Rosenbaum wrote,

Sam Tanenhaus wrote in New York Times Book Review in 2007:

But, Tanenhaus went on to answer his question:

V. S. Pritchett praised Bellow, finding his shorter works to be his best. Pritchett called Bellow's novella Seize the Day a "small gray masterpiece."^[9]

Bellow's account of his 1975 trip to Israel, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, was criticized by Noam Chomsky in his 1983 book Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel & the Palestinians. Bellow, Chomsky wrote, "sees an Israel where ‘almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare,’ where the people ‘think so hard, and so much’ as they ‘farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and finally create an army of tough fighters.’ He has also been criticized for having praised Joan Peters's book, From Time Immemorial, which denied the existence of Palestinians and was exposed almost immediately after publication as containing gross falsifications of the sources it cited.^[32][33]

As he grew older, Bellow moved decidedly away from leftist politics and became identified with cultural conservatism.^[20] His opponents included feminism, campus activism^[34] and postmodernism. In 1995 along with Lynne V. Cheney and other noted conservatives, he helped found the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) based in Washington, D.C. and funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation and John M. Olin Foundation^{[citation needed]} Promoting the Core Curriculum view of liberal education, the ACTA is best known for its 2001 report, Defending Civilization . . . , which met with wide criticism and accusations of neo-McCarthyism, because it served as a broadside against a "liberal academia" that the report authors saw as being insufficiently patriotic and "soft" on international terrorism.^[35] Following a barrage of criticism, ACTA published a "revised and expanded" version.

Bellow also thrust himself into the often contentious realm of Jewish and African-American relations. In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow's portrayal of a black pickpocket who exposes himself in public was criticized, by some activists, as racist. In 2007, attempts to name a street after Bellow in his Hyde Park neighborhood were scotched by local alderman on the grounds that Bellow had made remarks about the neighborhood's current inhabitants that they considered racist.^[36]

In an interview in the March 7, 1988 New Yorker, Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." The taunt was seen by some as a slight against non-Western literature. Bellow at first claimed to have been misquoted. Later, writing in his defense in the New York Times, he said, "The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin... Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see." Bellow claimed to have remembered shortly after making his infamous comment that he had in fact read a Zulu novel in translation: Chaka by Thomas Mofolo (an inaccuracy remains in this: Mofolo's novel is in Sesotho, not Zulu).

Despite his identification with Chicago, he kept aloof from some of that city's more conventional writers. Studs Terkel in a 2006 interview with Stop Smiling magazine said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend'. But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love Seize the Day."

Quotations[link]

"[There is] an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for."^[37]

"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."^[38]

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."^[39]

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."^[40]

Bibliography[link]

Novels and novellas[link]

• Dangling Man (1944)
• The Victim (1947)
• The Adventures of Augie March (1953) — National Book Award for Fiction^[41]
• Seize the Day (1956)
• Henderson the Rain King (1959)
• Herzog (1964) — National Book Award^[42]
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) — National Book Award^[43]
• Humboldt's Gift (1975) — winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction^[44]
• The Dean's December (1982)
• More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
• A Theft (1989)
• The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
• The Actual (1997)
• Ravelstein (2000)

Short Story Collections[link]

• Mosby's Memoirs (1968)
• Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
• Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)
• Collected Stories (2001)

Library of America editions[link]

• 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)

Translations[link]

• Gimpel the Fool (1945) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (trans. by Bellow in 1953)

Non-Fiction[link]

• To Jerusalem and Back (1976) — memoir
• It All Adds Up (1994) — essay collection
• Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor (2010) — correspondence

Works about Saul Bellow[link]

• Saul Bellow, Tony Tanner (1965) (see also his City of Words [1971])
• Saul Bellow, Malcolm Bradbury (1982)
• Saul Bellow Drumlin Woodchuck,Mark Harris, University of Georgia Press. (1982)
• Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom (Ed.) (1986)
• Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, Harriet Wasserman (1997)
• Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism, Michael K Glenday (1990)
• Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, Ruth Miller, St. Martins Pr. (1991)
• Bellow: A Biography, James Atlas (2000)
• "Even Later" and "The American Eagle" in Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché (2001) are celebratory. The latter essay is also found in the Everyman's Library edition of Augie March.
• 'Saul Bellow's comic style': James Wood in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004. ISBN 0-224-06450-9.
• The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo , Stephanie Halldorson (2007)
• Saul Bellow a song, written by Sufjan Stevens on The Avalanche

See also[link]

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
• Wilhelm Reich

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (May 2011)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Saul Bellow

• Mr. Sammler's City, City Journal, Spring 2008
• Nobel site with two speeches (one of which is an audio recording) & longer biography
• Annotated Bibliography of Criticism by the Saul Bellow Society
• Bellow's 1955 autobiographical statement for reference book
• Gordon Lloyd Harper (Winter 1966). "Saul Bellow, The Art of Fiction No. 37". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4405/the-art-of-fiction-no-37-saul-bellow. 
• JM Coetzee on the early novels
• Slate's assortment of other writers' takes on Bellow, mostly eulogistic
• Joyce Carol Oates on Saul Bellow
• Saul Bellow 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.
• Blogpost on Bellow's Russian family name–Belo or Belov?
• Review of Bellow's collected letters
• Saul Bellow, a neocon’s tale by John Podhoretz
• Reflections with Saul Bellow by Dejan Stojanović
• Saul Bellow's grave, Brattleboro, Vermont
• 'Between Fiction and Autobiography', review of Letters in The Oxonian Review
• "Bellow and Trotsky", Judie Newman, Berfrois, 1 June 2011

Melissa Block (born c. 1962) is an American radio host and journalist. She is one of the hosts of NPR's All Things Considered news program.

Biography[link]

Block was recording an interview in Chengdu, China when the area was struck by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake.^[1] Her coverage of the earthquake earned NPR a George Foster Peabody Award.

She is an alumni of Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Geneva.^[2]

See also[link]

• Michele Norris
• Robert Siegel

References[link]

External links[link]

• NPR biography