IT All Adds up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

Saul Bellow's fiction, honored by a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer, among other awards, has made him a literary giant. Now the man himself and a lifetime of his insightful views on a range of topics spring off the page in this, his first nonfiction collection, which encompasses articles, lectures, essays, travel pieces, and an "Autobiography of Ideas." It All Adds Up is a fascinating journey through literary America over the last forty years, guided by one of the "most gifted chroniclers in the Western World" (The London Times).

Table of Contents:
Preface Mozart: An Overture Part One: Riding Off in All Directions In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt Literary Notes on Khrushchev The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them A Talk with the Yellow Kid Part Two: Writers, Intellectuals, Politics The Sealed Treasure Facts That Put Fancy to Flight White House and Artists A Matter of the Soul An Interview with Myself Nobel Lecture Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence Part Three: The Distracted Public The Jefferson Lectures The Distracted Public There Is Simply Too Much to Think About Part Four: Thoughts in Transition Spanish Letter Illinois Journey Israel: The Six-Day War New York: World-Famous Impossibility The Day They Signed the Treaty My Paris Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is Vermont: The Good Place Winter in Tuscany Part Five: A Few Farewells Isaac Rosenfeld John Berryman John Cheever Allan Bloom William Arrowsmith Part Six: Impressions and Notions A Half Life A Second Half Life

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'.

Review :
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature