Where to Start with Saul Bellow: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Saul Bellow — whether to begin with Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, or The Adventures of Augie March. A complete reading guide.
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and is widely considered the most important American novelist of the postwar period — the writer who brought intellectual seriousness, philosophical ambition, and the energy of the American vernacular together in a way that no one before or after has quite managed. His major novels — The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift — constitute one of the great careers in American fiction.
Where to Start
The Best Entry Point: Seize the Day (1956)
The ideal first Bellow — a short, perfectly constructed novella that demonstrates all his gifts in miniature. Tommy Wilhelm’s single terrible day in a New York hotel (living down the hall from his successful, cold father; losing his last money in the commodities market; being manipulated by the shabby therapist Dr. Tamkin) is Bellow’s most concentrated account of the failure of the American male who cannot connect his intellectual understanding of life with his emotional needs. The final scene — Tommy weeping in the midst of a stranger’s funeral — is one of the great endings in American fiction. Approximately 120 pages; ideal for a weekend.
The Comic Novel: Henderson the Rain King (1959)
Bellow’s most exuberant and adventurous novel — and for many readers his funniest. Gene Henderson, a large, volatile Connecticut millionaire who is tormented by an inner voice demanding ‘I want! I want!’, travels to Africa and becomes involved with two tribal kingdoms, eventually becoming the Rain King through an accident that transforms both his social status and his understanding of what he wants. The novel is simultaneously a comic adventure, a critique of American imperialism and spirituality, and a serious investigation of what motivates human desire. Bellow at his most playful.
The Intellectual Comedy: Herzog (1964)
Bellow’s most celebrated novel and the fullest demonstration of his ambition — the attempt to create a fiction that is simultaneously a psychological novel, a philosophical essay, and a comedy. Moses Herzog’s letters (to Nietzsche, to Eisenhower, to his ex-wife, to his mother) are the best extended example of Bellow’s ‘first-person singular’ — a consciousness that thinks at the highest level while living at the most chaotic personal level. The novel won the National Book Award and established Bellow as the central figure in American literary fiction.
The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
The novel that made Bellow’s reputation — a picaresque from Depression-era Chicago that announces itself from the first sentence as something new in American fiction. Augie’s encounters (with his powerful grandmother-figure Mrs. Renling, with the eagle trainer Thea, with his criminal brother Simon) are arranged not as a plot but as a series of tests of Augie’s ability to remain himself while everyone around him attempts to shape him to their purposes. The prose is the novel’s greatest achievement: a synthesis of American slang, Yiddish rhythms, and the Western literary tradition unlike anything before or since.
Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize winner — a novel loosely based on his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz, here the brilliant, doomed Von Humboldt Fleisher. The narrator Charlie Citrine attempts to understand what Humboldt’s failed life and art have to teach him while managing a series of comic crises involving his ex-wife, his girlfriend, and a Chicago mobster. The novel is Bellow’s most explicit engagement with Anthroposophist thought (Rudolf Steiner’s account of the spirit world) and his most sustained meditation on the fate of serious art in American commercial culture.
Reading Saul Bellow
Bellow’s prose is among the most pleasurable in American fiction — a combination of intellectual precision, Jewish comic timing, and a responsiveness to the physical world that makes his sentences simultaneously dense and immediate. The best approach is to read him for the texture of his narrators’ minds: the novels are less about what happens than about how an exceptionally intelligent, emotionally conflicted person experiences what happens. Readers who come to Bellow expecting plot will miss the novels’ greatest pleasures; readers who engage with the narrators’ consciousness will find each novel its own world.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Saul Bellow?
Seize the Day (1956) is the best starting point — a short novella (about 120 pages) set over a single day in which Tommy Wilhelm, a failed salesman in his forties, watches his last financial resources disappear in the commodities market while attempting to connect with his cold father and confronting his own failures. It is Bellow's most compressed and most emotionally immediate work — a masterpiece of the American novella form. Herzog is the best starting point for readers who want Bellow's full novelistic scope; Henderson the Rain King for those who want his most adventurous and comic mode.
What is Herzog about?
Herzog (1964) follows Moses Herzog, a brilliant but hapless professor who is recovering from the collapse of his second marriage and writing unsent letters to famous thinkers, historical figures, and his own acquaintances in an attempt to work out why his life has gone wrong. The novel is Bellow's most intellectually ambitious — Herzog's letters engage with Nietzsche, Hegel, the nature of modern selfhood, and the question of whether individual human life has meaning — but it is also very funny: Herzog's haplessness is rendered with Bellow's warmest comedy. Many critics consider it Bellow's finest novel.
What is The Adventures of Augie March about?
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is Bellow's breakthrough novel and the most exuberant — a picaresque account of Augie March's journey from Depression-era Chicago through a series of adventures and relationships, told in a prose that draws on American vernacular, Yiddish, and the Western intellectual tradition simultaneously. The novel famously opens: 'I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.' It is Bellow's most ambitious formal experiment and his most American novel.
Did Saul Bellow win the Nobel Prize?
Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. He had previously won the National Book Award three times (for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet) and the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift (1975). The Nobel citation described him as a writer who 'combines a penetrating portrayal of man and an analysis of contemporary culture with a rich and varied style.' He is widely considered the most significant American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century before Philip Roth and Don DeLillo.
