SAUL BELLOW'S CITY FICTION

The dissertation focuses on the challenge the city and city experience have posed to Bellow throughout his career. The dissertation begins by examining the works of Bellow's literary apprenticeship, Dangling Man and The Victim. It follows Bellow's first, self-conscious efforts to find his place as a city writer and intellectual in the tradition of modern urban fiction and to come to terms as a city man and Jew with the emerging cosmopolitan world of post-war America. The dissertation continues with an examination of Augie March and Seize the Day. It reveals Bellow forging his original voice as a city writer, while establishing the continuity of his development from a literary apprentice to a literary master.; The dissertation then turns to Henderson the Rain King, Bellow's only major work without a dominant city setting. Examining Henderson's quest, the dissertation confirms Bellow's observation that he cannot "possibly separate my knowledge of life, such as it is, from the city" and his judgement that from Henderson he "dates being in fullest command of his powers." The dissertation then attends to the success that meets Bellow's efforts in Herzog and Sammler's Planet to adapt his mature style to the demands of his own native ground. Here, Bellow realizes what had been his ambition, but not his accomplishment as a young writer, when he took as the subject of his art the challenge of the city which informs all his later fiction.; The dissertation concludes with a brief consideration of Humboldt's Gift. A compendium of the many uses Bellow has made of the city in his long career, Humboldt's Gift offers a fitting coda to a study of his accomplishment as a city writer. In Bellow's thinly-veiled memoir of the progress of his generation of city Jews and city intellectuals from interlopers on the American scene to media celebrities and culture heroes, it finds a valediction for his generation's formative role in enacting and interpreting the public spectacles and private dramas of an America discovering itself as an irremediably urban world.