Adam Bellow
Sapir, Nov. 18, 2024
In 1970 my father, Saul Bellow, published Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His seventh novel, it came on the heels of major works that had long since established him as the preeminent American writer of his generation.
The book was immediately hailed as a triumph, reviewed and praised in every significant outlet. Here again, readers were told, were the signature marks of his method — gritty urban realism, a flawed and introspective intellectual protagonist, a gallery of eccentric characters based on real people in his life, a no-holds-barred exposure of Jewish family comedy, and (for the first time) direct engagement with the Holocaust, a theme he had previously treated only glancingly.
But it was also controversial — intensely so, and clearly by design. A direct intervention in the social and political debates of the time, it was seen as taking up conservative themes, particularly the bad effects of the sexual revolution and “black power” protest on American society and culture. Consequently, it was called “the first neoconservative novel” and lamented in liberal circles as a sign of the author’s deplorable “turn to the right.”. …SOURCE
ADAM BELLOW is the publisher of Wicked Son Books and the executive editor at Bombardier Books, imprints of Post Hill Press. He is the co-founder of the Jewish Literary Fund.