This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.
This week’s issue of The New Yorker features a selection of Saul Bellow’s letters to other writers. In one of the early letters, written in 1948, after Bellow had published two novels, he writes to David Bazelon:
That fuse was finally lit five years later with the publication of “The Adventures of Augie March,” Bellow’s “loose-limbed” picaresque about the youth and adolescence of its eponymous hero. After the critical and popular success of “Augie,” Bellow produced a series of notable books, including “Henderson the Rain King,” “Herzog,” and “Humboldt’s Gift,” effectively bringing Jewish literature into the American mainstream. Bellow’s work led the way for writers such as Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick. In 1976, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Writing about Bellow in The New Yorker in 1998, James Atlas noted:
Bellow was born in Quebec, but raised in Chicago, the city that is the setting for many of his books. Chicago is also the setting for today’s selection, “A Silver Dish,” from the issue of September 25, 1978. The story concerns Woody Selbst, a tile contractor, who seeks to find a way to mourn his less-than-perfect father, Morris. In this scene, Woody is lying in bed on a Sunday morning a few days after his father’s death, listening to church bells ring all over Chicago:
There is a great deal more on Bellow in the archive, including John Updike’s review of “Humboldt’s Gift,” Philip Roth’s thoughts on Bellow’s major novels, and Joan Acocella’s appraisal of a compendium of Bellow’s early work.