The Dean's December (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Bellow, Saul

3.57

1,430 ratings by Goodreads

9780140189131: The Dean's December (Penguin Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140189130 ISBN 13: 9780140189131

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1998

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Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters through to him of problems left behind in Chicago. A student has been murdered and Corde had directed that charges be pressed against two black youths, but controversy and pressure are mounting against the university administration. Further, a series of articles Corde had written has offended powerful and influential Chicagoans whom Corde had counted on as friends. Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanizing.

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From the Back Cover:

THE DEAN'S DECEMBER
by Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1976
The Vesuvian eloquence of Saul Bellow is one of the glories of modern literature.
-Jonathan Raban Sunday Times

A novel that will raise its readers to fever pitch of the kind of passionate excitement and involvement that only real art can inspire.
-Salman Rushdie New Statesman

A wittily meditative book, an intensely serious enterprise from a writer we can see we are right to acknowledge as of world class.
-Malcolm Bradbury Books and Bookmen

A brilliant piece of work...different in many ways from much of his earlier work, it is one of his best.
-David Holloway Sunday Telegraph

There is in The Dean's December enough thought and matter for ten other contemporary novels.
-Melvyn Bragg Punch

A serious, sane, thought-provoking novel of a kind rare these days, a worthy addition to the canon of a writer of genius.
-Paul Bailey Standard

In Saul Bellow the American novelist has come of age.
-Geoffrey Moore Financial Times

An overall mastery of form...and at times a sublime intensity.
-Lewis Jones Spectator

Bellow has at last created a plausible and likeable woman and has done so with wonderful economy.
-Gabriel Josipovici Times Literary Supplement

The shape of Saul Bellow's new novel is satisfyingly simple.
-Ian McEwan Observer

Near the end of Saul Bellow's admirable new novel, the dean is accused of "abyssifying and catastrophising".
-Thomas Hinde Sunday Telegraph

By any standards, a marvellous novel, rich, provocative, illuminating...buy it and read it: more than once.
-Alan Massie Scotsman

About the Author:

Saul Bellow was born in Quebec in 1915 and moved to Chicago with his family when he was nine years old. He attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and has also won the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, the National Medal of Arts and the 1990 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters.

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