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Authors
Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
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Bellow is the author of fourteen novels and novellas: Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), The Dean’s December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), The Actual (1997), and Ravelstein (2000). His short stories appear in three collections: Mosby’s Memoirs (1968), Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984), and Something to Remember Me By (1991), and are joined by an additional story in Collected Stories (2001). A play, The Last Analysis, was produced in New York in 1964 and published the following year. To Jerusalem and Back (1976) is a personal account of his activities in Israel. It All Adds Up (1994) draws on Bellow’s essays dating back to 1948. James Atlas’s Bellow: A Biography (2000) is exhaustive yet critically focused. Malcolm Bradbury provides the best concise introduction to this author’s major work in Saul Bellow (1982), while in Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980) fellow writer Mark Harris offers an insightful portrait of Bellow as a professional figure. John J. Clayton’s Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man (1979) celebrates the author’s stressfully tested humanism, while Ellen Pifer’s Saul Bellow: Against the Grain (1990) argues for his culturally atypical belief in the transcendent soul. Gender is Gloria L. Cronin’s focus in A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow (2001). In Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (1984) Daniel Fuchs examines manuscripts and letters to establish Bellow’s Dostoyevskian engagement with issues of character. Julia Eichelberger sums up his work in Prophets of Recognition (1999).
Saul Bellow grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal and moved to Chicago at age nine. He attended the University of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern with a degree in anthropology and sociology. In his novels and short stories, Bellow most often focuses on the lives and intellectual adventures of men and women in American cities, most often Chicago or New York City. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976 for "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work." Among Bellow's many works are The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (1968), Humboldt's Gift (1975), and Something to Remember Me By (1991).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
One of the recurring and distinguishing traits of Bellow's fiction is the comic, sad discrepancy between the education which we labor to acquire in colleges and universities and the kind of wisdom required of us in handling ordinary life. Bellow's protagonists are often erudite blunderers, hoping vainly that the world beyond the campus will make sense -- the kind of sense that intellectuals value. Looking for Mr. Green (1951) is an early story by Bellow, but it shares characteristics with work from his major phase.
1. Describe the conversation between Grebe and Raynor, his supervisor. Grebe is surprised by the direction that this conversation takes. Why? Does he find it comforting or disconcerting?
2. What is Grebe's attitude toward African Americans, the people among whom he goes looking for Mr. Green? Over the course of the story, is there any transformation in the way that he sees them?
3. In Growing Up Absurd (1960), sociologist Paul Goodman asserted that a great crisis facing the United States was the alienation of millions of citizens, an alienation born of working mindless or unsatisfying jobs. Is this is a theme of Looking for Mr. Green? If so, describe the spirit in which that theme is explored or advanced.
