With those remembered rhythms in his ear, that syntax and vocabulary on his tongue—an amalgam of immigrant speech, tabloid reporting, and being told in school that “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were your Presidents”—he could take a deep breath and exhale the poetic, ragged, semicriminal world full of hungry expectation from which he had emerged.
Authors Saul Bellow
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We were both products of the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. So far as I know, he never went on any anthropological expeditions, and neither did I. We invented preindustrial peoples instead—I in Cat’s Cradle and he in Henderson the Rain King.
Vivian Gornick
Kurt Vonnegut
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Of the American writers—well, I read Saul Bellow with admiration. He never quite pulls off a book for me, but he’s interesting—which is more than you can say for so many of the other Jewish Giants, carving their endless Mount Rushmores out of halvah.
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Because I had to memorize most of Genesis, my first consciousness was that of a cosmos, and in that cosmos I was a Jew.
Gore Vidal
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow’s opinions on others
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Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether.
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In a public statement Mr. Robert Penn Warren recently observed that he liked to write in a foreign country, “where the language is not your own, and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” When I began to write The Adventures of Augie March I was living in Paris, where circumstances made me constantly aware that I was not a Frenchman.
Henderson the Rain King
The Adventures of Augie March