Letters by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. New York: Viking, 2010. xxxvii+571 pp. $35.00, hardcover.
Saul Bellow is the most coruscating stylist, the most brilliant intellect, the most compassionate and great-souled writer in modern American literature. Combining poetic style and street language, he describes himself in a Chicago blizzard: “in a snowdrift—night, starless. And chainless” (231); a friend had a mobile “beard that seemed to have rushed out of him and muffled his face” (537). Bellow belongs with the incisive, self-revealing letter writers: Byron, Keats, Woolf, Lawrence, Beckett, and Lowell. His voices, varying theatrically with each correspondent, are deferential, caustic, high-minded, jokey, intimate, outrageous, sexy, gallant, satiric, passionate, brutal, seductive, and heimlich.
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