The Adventures of Saul Bellow

Explore Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow's impact on American literature and how he navigated through issues of his time, including race, gender and the Jewish immigrant experience. Featuring interviews with Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and others.

Ernest Hemingway was the master of the simple, declarative sentence during his time. By contrast, when Saul Bellow came along, he wrote descriptive sentences full of verbal energy. "This was a great shift in the American notion of what a great prose style was," said Philip Roth.

Saul Bellow's novel "The Dean's December," released in 1982, details the blowback a writer faces after publishing an exposé on Chicago's corruption. "You can't live in Chicago without being sharply aware of the presence of this underclass," said Bellow of writing about the city in the 1980s.

Salman Rushdie talks about some of his favorite Saul Bellow books in this outtake from "The Adventures of Saul Bellow." Rushdie says, "These are some of the great masterpieces of American literature."

In this outtake from "The Adventures of Saul Bellow," Philip Roth describes his friendship with and admiration for Bellow, and he Bellow was a "powerhouse" of an author. "There are very few tools that he couldn't pick up and use," Roth said in the final interview he gave before his death in 2018.