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Hurricane Man
SAUL BELLOW:
Letters.
Edited by Benjamin Taylor.
Viking.
571 pp. $35
In a little essay about Mozart that Saul Bellow wrote toward the end of his life, he expressed admiration for the prodigious composer’s facility with melody and harmony, and marveled at the way the music “is given so readily, easily, gratuitously. For it is not a product of effort. What it makes us see is that there are things which must be done easily. Easily or not at all—that is the truth about art.” If we needed reminding that Bellow—who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, and every other major literary award besides—warrants mention in the same breath as Mozart, we now have it in his collected letters. This volume, well edited and ably introduced by novelist and essayist Benjamin Taylor, who spent years collecting its contents, is at once an autobiographical portrait and a work of literature unto itself.
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Michael O’Donnell’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, The Washington Monthly, and The Los Angeles Times.
more from this author >>
Transatlantic Poet
THE AGE OF AUDEN:Postwar Poetry and the American Scene.
By Aidan Wasley.
Princeton Univ. Press.
280 pp. $35
Communist Manifesto
A DICTIONARY OF 20TH-CENTURY COMMUNISM.Edited by Silvio Pons and Robert Service.
Translated by Mark Epstein and Charles Townsend.
Princeton Univ. Press.
921 pp. $99.50
Bowling with God
AMERICAN GRACE:How Religion Divides and Unites Us.
By Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell.
Simon & Schuster.
673 pp. $30
