Novels of the Forties

Abstract

Looked at in retrospect the canon of Bellow’s fiction exhibits a remarkable degree of uniformity, but it would be presumptuous to attempt to render the literary output of a fifty-year career down to a few simple formulae; from relatively limited beginnings Bellow has developed a rich and complex body of work of extensive intellectual scope, which to a degree unequalled amongst contemporary writers has attracted the attention of academic critics and scholars. Books have been written on his humanism, his nihilism, his comic vision, his debt to Jewish tradition, his treatment of history, his position in relation to modernism. Clearly, a study of the dimensions of the current one cannot hope to do justice to this profusion. Still, some general observations can be made about Bellow’s work.