Bellow's people - David Mikics

David Mikics has been hailed by Harold Bloom as one of our finest literary critics. In this fresh and revealing book, he examines Saul Bellow's work through the real-life relationships and friendships that Bellow transmuted into the genius of his art. The book is divided into eight chapters on some of the extraordinary people who mattered most to Bellow-family members like his irascible brother Morrie; friends like the novelists and critics Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom; and wives and lovers. Bellow's People is a perfect introduction to Bellow's life and work and an incisive study of the art of literature. As Mikics argues, "Bellow is our novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings. Only through personality, he tells us, can we know the world."

David Mikics is the Moores Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston. He is the author, most recently, of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, and his writing has appeared in Tablet, the New Republic, and the New York Times.

... a breezy, highly readable and often entertaining study of some important figures in the author's life...
Jay Parini

The book [Bellow's People] also makes one want to rediscover Bellow's characters in all their Dickensian, tragi-comic brilliance, and read again his sentences, which shine with a rare intensity.