Does anyone still read Saul Bellow?

“My god, I didn’t know people still read Saul Bellow.”

That’s what a passerby said to Stanford University professor of Jewish history, Steven Zipperstein.

Zipperstein told that little story in 2001, when this talk was given. And back then, Bellow’s celebrated and controversial novel, Ravelstein, had just appeared.

What’s Bellow awareness like now?

Dunno. But it doesn’t look good. Adam Gopnik recently wrote in the New Yorker about J.D. Salinger’s stand against Hemingway’s hardboiled style without reminding himself of the manifesto that was the first page of Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, which referred to Hemingway and named the hardboiled style as the enemy.

So this is an invitation to Saul Bellow fans to submit their favorite Bellow lines. I’ll kick it off with one of mine from Humboldt’s Gift:

“The living and the dead form one community.”

Who’s next?