Ravelstein - Softcover

Bellow, Saul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141001003 ISBN 13: 9780141001005

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

"Abe Ravelstein IS the American mind and Bellow its finest living (thank God) voice." John Sutherland, Sunday Times "Bellow's return with RAVELSTEIN to an earlier, freer, more voice-driven exuberance is an astonishment to me. I have to keep reminding myself that the author was born, not in 1950, but in 1915." Martin Amis in EXPERIENCE "Full of the old, cascading power... His people are embodied with souls; they wear their stretched essences on their bodies, and it is Bellow's delight to, as it were, 'read' their souls through their surfaces, as a Victorian phrenologist might have read the skull." - James Wood, Guardian. "A late quartet by a master." The Telegraph

About this title

About the Author:

Saul Bellow was born in 1915 to Russian emigre parents. As a young child in Chicago, Bellow was raised on books - the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Chekhov - and learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He set his heart on becoming a writer after reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to his mother's hopes that he would become a rabbi or a concert violinist. He was educated at the University of Chicago and North-Western University, graduating in Anthropology and Sociology; he then went on to work for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bellow published his first novel, The Dangling Man, in 1944; this was followed, in 1947, by The Victim. In 1948 a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Bellow to travel to Paris, where he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953. Henderson The Rain King (1959) brought Bellow worldwide fame, and in 1964, his best-known novel, Herzog, was published and immediately lauded as a masterpiece, 'a well-nigh faultless novel' (New Yorker). Saul Bellow's dazzling career as a novelist was celebrated during his lifetime with an unprecedented array of literary prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. In 1976 he was awarded a Nobel Prize 'for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work'. Bellow's death in 2005 was met with tribute from writers and critics around the world, including James Wood, who praised 'the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself'.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0141001003
• ISBN 13: 9780141001005
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240