Word: bellow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nearing his 80th birthday, Bellow remains America's most distinguished living writer, thickly bronzed by literary honors that include a Nobel Prize. But public monuments attract pigeons, in Bellow's case the flock of critics and political correctionists who dismiss his traditional humanism, learning and individuality as elitist or worse. Liberals and leftists have long attacked him as an insensitive conservative. Feminist discontent about the women in his fiction has been duly registered. More recently, Brent Staples, an editorial writer for the New York Times, objected in a memoir to the portrayal of a black man in Mr. Sammler...
...Saul Bellow's It All Adds Up (Viking; 327 pages; $24.95) adds up to a stimulating kvetch, a nonfiction Herzog. Like that novel's title character, Bellow shows himself in this collection of essays and criticism to be a great complainer and world worrier. He is, as the Herzog jacket copy described the book's hero 30 years ago, someone who "cannot keep from asking what he calls the 'piercing questions...
...Bellow responded that a journalist had misunderstood that particular "piercing question" and noted that neither the Bulgarians nor the Americans have a Proust. Then he made the ornery outburst: "My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the Third World. I am an elderly white male -- a Jew to boot. Ideal for their purposes...
These are touchy times. Bellow prefers the frank give-and-take of old Chicago, where he grew up multicultural long before the word was coined. As he writes in a 1990 piece, "The absence of an idea of defamation was very liberating...
...center is like a teaching hospital forlaw, and just like a teaching hospital it providesstudents vital clinical experience," said Bellow,who is director of clinical programs for theHarvard Law School...