SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. “Saul Bellow: ‘What, in All of This, Speaks for Man?’” Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (spring 1995): 89-95.

In the following essay, Pinsker elucidates the central concerns of Bellow's fiction, contending his novels and short stories matter “not only for those who care about the state of American fiction but also for those worried about the spiritual condition of America itself.”

An artist, Saul Bellow once remarked, is a person obliged to see, and then to note what has been observed with a certain style. Bellow's greatness as an American writer rests on the clarity of his vision and the lively, thickly textured paragraphs his vision produces. In an age when the American novel often seems to have fallen on thin times, Bellow is a notable exception, not only because fiction remains for him what it always was—namely, “a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which...