SOURCE: Phillips, Adam. “Bellow and Ravelstein.” Raritan 20, no. 2 (fall 2000): 1-10.

In the following review, Phillips asserts that Ravelstein is not a biography, but rather “a fiction about biography.”

In Diana Trilling's memoir The Beginning of the Journey she tells a story about Saul Bellow to illustrate the effect that Lionel Trilling had on people. Lionel, she writes,

always retained a certain air of unassailability. There were people whom this seemed to disturb. In middle life, he lectured at the University of Chicago, and Saul Bellow, who taught there and with whom he had become pleasantly acquainted in the early fifties when Bellow was writing The Adventures of Augie March, invited him to have a drink after his talk. For their drinking place Bellow chose a bar in a desperate quarter of the city; it was the gathering place of drunks and deadbeats, a refuge of people who had...