SOURCE: Webb, Igor. “The Demands of a Soul.” Partisan Review 68, no. 2 (spring 2001): 324-28.

In the following essay, Webb investigates Bellow's invoking of John Maynard Keynes in Ravelstein.

Ravelstein is a celebrated professor [in Ravelstein] of political philosophy—a character based, so it has been said everywhere, on Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. I'd better say right away that I know precious little about Saul Bellow's personal life, that I've never met Allan Bloom, and that anyway I do not have the stomach to believe that you can simply translate any life into fiction. The connections and disconnections between Bloom and Bellow and the connections and disconnections between Bloom and Ravelstein may have a certain interest—but not for Virginia Woolf's common reader, with whom I'm happy to identify: we want to read the book, and expect the road into its thickets to be...