Abstract
The post-Holocaust decades of the 1940s and 1950s found Saul Bellow a relatively inexperienced writer passionately committed to humanistic agendas, and increasingly less convinced that Utopian radical politics held the answer to mankind’s ills. As his left-leaning political idealism faded he made his withdrawal from the Partisan Review crowd and steadily became an entrenched neo-conservative. He intended to make his mark on American letters, score heavily in the international literary arena, write the great American novel, and mount a passionate defense of the human soul. If he could simultaneously supplant the monumental Hemingway, all to the good. He rode into American literary history on the tidal wave of the “Jewish Decades” of the 1940s and 1950s that breached forever the WASP hegemony in American letters. By 1976 he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Ernest was gone.
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© 2014 Gloria L. Cronin
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Cronin, G.L. (2014). Herzog’s Masculine Dilemmas, and the Eclipse of the Transcendental “I.”. In: Allen, N., Simmons, D. (eds) Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366016_14
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