It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (Introduction)

Overview

A fascinating journey through literary America over the last forty years, guided by one of the "most gifted chroniclers in the Western World" (The London Times)

It All Adds Up, Saul Bellow’s first nonfiction collection, takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary America over the past forty years. In sentence after sentence, page after page, readers are offered brilliant perceptions and unusual insights into everyday life in America and the life of the mind. From political figures like Roosevelt and Khrushchev to artists like Mozart, Dostoevsky, and John Cheever; life in cities like New York, Paris and Chicago; and in a deeply personal "Autobiography of Ideas," Bellow, with great humour and wisdom, records the enduring thoughts and opinions of a lifetime of observation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143106685
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,155,797
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is the only novelist to receive three National book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet.  In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift.  The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him in 1976 "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work."  In 1990, Mr. Bellow was presented the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. He has also received the National Medal of Arts. His books include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby’s Memoirs (1969), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), To Jerusalem and Back (1976), The Dean’s December (1982), Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Something to Remember Me By (1991), It All Adds Up (1994), The Actual (1997), Ravelstein (2000) and Collected Stories (2001). A longtime resident of Chicago, Bellow was living and teaching in Boston at the time of his death in 2005.

Date of Birth:

June 10, 1915

Date of Death:

April 5, 2005

Place of Birth:

Lachine, Quebec, Canada

Place of Death:

Brookline, Massachusetts

Education:

University of Chicago, 1933-35; B.S., Northwestern University, 1937

Read an Excerpt

Mozart: An Overture
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "It All Adds Up"
by .
Copyright © 1995 Saul Bellow.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface
Mozart: An Overture

Part One: Riding Off in All Directions
In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt
Literary Notes on Khrushchev
The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them
A Talk with the Yellow Kid

Part Two: Writers, Intellectuals, Politics
The Sealed Treasure
Facts That Put Fancy to Flight
White House and Artists
A Matter of the Soul
An Interview with Myself
Nobel Lecture
Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence

Part Three: The Distracted Public
The Jefferson Lectures
The Distracted Public
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About

Part Four: Thoughts in Transition
Spanish Letter
Illinois Journey
Israel: The Six-Day War
New York: World-Famous Impossibility
The Day They Signed the Treaty
My Paris
Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is
Vermont: The Good Place
Winter in Tuscany

Part Five: A Few Farewells
Isaac Rosenfeld
John Berryman
John Cheever
Allan Bloom
William Arrowsmith
Part Six: Impressions and Notions
A Half Life
A Second Half Life

Editorial Reviews

Fans of Nobel Prize-winning author Bellow should enjoy this wide-ranging selection of more than 30 nonfiction pieces--lectures and articles reprinted from Esquire , the New Republic , the New York Times , etc. Bellow's roving and astute eye produces memorable reportage, such as a portrait of a retired Chicago con man and other Windy City scenes, and his view of the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. He also offers neat sketches of colleagues like Allan Bloom, John Berryman and John Cheever. But the meat of the book is Bellow's tart, sometimes dyspeptic cultural commentary, exemplified by his Nobel Lecture criticizing writers for failing to challenge orthodoxies, and his laments at the useless distractions of the Information Revolution and the intellectual frivolities of bohemian New York City. Invoking Tolstoy, Nabokov and Flaubert, among others, Bellow muses on the novelist's responsibilities and, in three lively interviews, offers illuminating autobiographical reflections on reading, writing, teaching and life (``I've had more metamorphoses than I can count''). 50,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Bellow is America's writer, and in this superb collection of nonfiction essays he demonstates his vigilance of and loyalty to his country over a span of 45 years. From his earliest piece, a war report from Spain written for the Partisan Review (1948), to his Novel Prize lecture (1976), to a recent Forbes article entitled ``There Is Simply Too Much To Think About,'' Bellow is consumed by the idea of America--so great, so accomplished, so magical--destroying its soul. ``The cost of all the great successes,'' he writes in ``The Jefferson Lectures'' (1977), ``may be the abasement of man.'' The Chicago native is the conscience of his city, and Washington, and New York . He reports from the Sinai during the Six Day War and mingles at White House dinners; his trenchant observations rip through the standard rigmarole. The years have sharpened his craft, and his memory. An essential purchase, this just might kindle interest in Bellow's oeuvre ( More Die of Heartbreak ; Humboldt's Gift ) among a younger generation.-- Amy Boaz, ``Library Journal''

Library Journal

"It All Adds Up" is almost pedestrian in its rootedness in the solid world. The pieces are rigidly discursive and largely about a universe of more pedestrian facts....What Mr. Bellow traces in this collection is his tortuous route to the threshold of easiness.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

From the Publisher