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Hosted by: Dick Gordon
Show Originally Aired: 12/30/2003 CALL 1 800-423-TALK
Celebrating Saul Bellow (Rebroadcast)
Image from the cover of "Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953" Email to friend
By the time Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, he had already populated American letters with a menagerie of characters you couldn't help but root for.
Fifty years ago, he gave us Augie March, a well-meaning, wandering "Columbus" who goes nowhere and everywhere in the course of six hundred bursting pages. There is Moses Herzog, embattled, embittered and twice-divorced, but hopeful, always hopeful. Even Bellow's supporting cast leaves an impression. A would-be prize fighter has "an immense face like raked garden soil in need of water." An institutionalized brother's look reveals "wisdom kept prisoner by incapacity." There are those who call Bellow "the greatest living American author." Two of them, Martin Amis and James Wood, explain why.
