By the time "A Silver Dish" was published in Saul Bellow's 1984 collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth, Bellow's reputation as one of the great American authors was already established. He had won most of the major awards available to writers, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. Still, even with a devout following of fans and scholars waiting for each new work, this collection was greeted with particular enthusiasm. Bellow's reputation was built by the novels that he published after the 1940s, but few readers had ever encountered his short fiction. With his reputation established, Bellow expanded the scope of his novels, inserting longer and longer passages of philosophical musings within the stories. As Sanford Pinsker explained it in his review of Him with His Foot in His Mouth for Studies in Short Fiction, "Saul Bellow's last novel, The Dean's December, confirmed what fans...