The Dean's December (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Bellow, Saul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141188863 ISBN 13: 9780141188867

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2008

Synopsis

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 had been 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 written by Corde has offended influential Chicagoans whom he had counted as friends. Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanising.

About this title

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 1915 to Russian émigré 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 Classics
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0141188863
• ISBN 13: 9780141188867
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320