Saul Bellow's stature in the postwar period of American literature can only be compared to that of Hemingway or Faulkner in the earlier part of the century. Nobel Laureate and winner of numerous prestigious fiction awards, Bellow has commanded serious attention from a large range of reviewers and critics at home and abroad for forty years. By now he is undoubtedly the most written about novelist of the contemporary American period.

This bibliography reflects this scholarly interest in Bellow as accurately and comprehensively as possible through 2001. By intent, however, we have not included everything he wrote or that has been written about him. The early critical reactions to Bellow consist of little more than book notices and sketchy reviews. Later as he becomes more generally recognized, more scholarly works appear. With few exceptions, any review or article with substantive critical commentary has been listed and annotated. Brief book notes or announcements providing little more than a plot summary, however, have generally been omitted. We have included all of his major works—novels, short fiction, plays, essays, and some miscellaneous writings. However, we have not included some early short publications that later appeared in revised form as parts of longer works.

In the annotations we have taken care to reflect the author's tone and choice of language. Annotations contain main ideas or summarize directions of thought but do not attempt to paraphrase the course of the article or its argument. Some articles, of course, lend themselves better to this approach than do others. Generally, the annotations are descriptive rather than evaluative, but occasionally we have noted major articles. The length of the annotation sometimes indicates the entry's importance. More often it reflects a clearly focused and organized article. We have not annotated the works by Bellow nor the reviews of the novels, short fiction, and plays. The citations to reviews are listed without annotation immediately following the annotated articles in each subsection of Criticism and Reviews.

Reviews providing substantial critical insight have been annotated and listed with the critical articles.

We have attempted to obtain copies of all the items included and to verify each citation, but there are some exceptions. In instances where, after three tries, we were unable to obtain a copy, we have listed it with a note showing in what bibliographic source it was cited. This is particularly true of some foreign language publications. In other instances, we received a copy of an item without any indication of source. If these citations could be verified in every detail in two or more bibliographic sources, i.e. MLA Bibliography, Abstracts of English Studies, American Literary Scholarship, Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, or one or more of the bibliographies listed in the section on Bibliographies and Checklists, we considered them verified citations.

The bibliography is divided into two main divisions: Primary Sources and Secondary Sources. In the first section we have categorized Bellow's works as Novels, Short Fiction, Plays, Essays, Miscellaneous Writings, and Interviews. The primary sources appear without annotations.

In listing the novels we have tried to discover and list all editions of each work, both English and foreign translations, hardbound and paperback. This listing has been compiled from the Library of Congress, National Union Catalog, Cumulative Book Index, Books in Print, Paperbound Books in Print, British Books in Print, British Museum Catalog, and the British National Bibliography, with additional information from the RLIN(Research Libraries Information Network) and OCLC shared cataloging online databases. The foreign language translations show only the publishing information, not the translated titles.

Under Short Fiction we have included only those titles that can be considered distinct short stories. We have excluded "short stories" that were reprinted parts of novels or that later became parts of novels in revised form. We have included both original sources of publication as well as reprint sources in short story collections since the latter will often be much more readily available to readers.

Bellow's dramatic writings were few, but we have treated them in much the same way as the short fiction, providing original publication sources as well as reprint sources.

Bellow's nonfiction works originally published in magazines, newspapers, journals, and books by other authors were more problematic. Generally we placed his longer, more substantial works in Essays, including his one nonfiction book, To Jerusalem and Back. We have also included as essays some major addresses later published as articles. The remainder of his nonfiction works have been categorized in Miscellaneous Writings. These include most of his book and movie reviews, forewords and introductions to the works of other authors, and shorter magazine and newspaper articles.

We categorized the interviews as primary sources on the basis that their main value to scholars is likely to be Bellow's own comments and ideas rather than those of the interviewers.

The Secondary Sources section has been arranged under the following headings: Bibliographies and Checklists, Books and Monographs, Special Journal Issues, Biographical Sources, Criticism and Reviews, and Doctoral Dissertations. Only the criticism has been annotated.

The Books and Monographs section includes three types of works: (1) works by a single author dealing with Bellow only, some based on doctoral dissertations, (2) works by a single author dealing with Bellow and one or more other authors, and (3) edited collections of essays, many of them reprinted from other sources. The books have not been annotated, but each of the essays in the edited collections has been listed and annotated in the appropriate subsection of Criticism and Reviews. There the citations for reprinted essays first show the original source publication with reprint sources following chronologically. We have also provided reprint and original source information for previously

published parts of the works in the two single-author categories when appropriate.

We have included a list, without annotations, of the articles from a wide variety of magazines, newspapers, and journals that provide information about Bellow's life. Users should also be aware that in some instances the interviews with Bellow also provide this kind of information as do some of the reviews and critical articles. Generally, we have included under Biography those items that focus primarily on Bellow rather than on his works. The critical sources with significant biographical content can be found indexed under "biography'' in the index.

In the Criticism and Reviews section, the sources have been listed in subsections devoted to each of Bellow's major works, his plays and short stories. General Articles, Chapters, and Reviews includes those sources not limited to a discussion of a single major work, the plays, or the short stories. The index, however, provides references to the specific works discussed in these sources.

Doctoral Dissertations includes only those cited in the Comprehensive Dissertation Index and Dissertation Abstracts International that specifically name Bellow or one of his works in the title. We have not cited the abstract source. These are readily available in the abstracting sources themselves.

A word about the Author and Subject Index. We have regularized author's names to a single form when multiple citations showed variations in the published sources. Interestingly, unpublished dissertations by these authors generally included full names, while most published sources used only initials for one or more given names. We have adopted the form with initials as the standard, unless a majority of published sources showed a preference for the full name or for eliminating initials.

The names of all authors are included in the index except for the authors of unannotated reviews. Anyone wanting to find reviews of specific works can do so by consulting the appropriate subsection under Criticism and Reviews where the reviews follow the annotated articles

in a separate subsection. This decision was based on the belief that users of the bibliography would find the index more useful if it listed only substantive items.

Users will also find the index a useful adjunct to the classified section on a specific work, referring them to relevant sources in the other sections of the bibliography, particularly the annotated articles under General Articles, Chapters, and Reviews.

The subject terms have been purposely limited since this was designed as a simple index and not as an exhaustive concordance. Some terms, such as "theme," "character," or "characterization" have not been included, since they represent the critical commonplaces of Bellow scholarship and would have unreasonably cluttered the index. However, some specific themes have been included under such terms as "death," "alienation," and "love." This is not a title index, but the titles of all Bellow's novels, short stories and short story collections, plays, and To Jerusalem and Back are included as subject terms.

The foreign sources presented several serious problems: (1) finding references and obtaining copies, (2) obtaining translations, (3) evaluating their importance, and (4) handling diacritics. In many instances, our interlibrary loan service was unable to verify the source publications or to obtain them. For some foreign language items, we therefore resorted to including only the citation with a note as to the source of the bibliographic information. Also, to facilitate preparation of the manuscript, we have arbitrarily eliminated all diacritics from names and titles.

We have not included in the bibliography an inventory of the manuscript or other special collections containing Bellow items. The major repositories of Bellow materials have limited access, generally requiring Bellow's direct permission. Those wishing further information should contact the libraries listed below directly for information about the contents and availability of their collections.

The major collection of Bellow manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, notes, reviews, translations, foreign editions of some works, galley proofs, and other papers have been deposited at the Regenstein Library at various times since 1963 by Mr. Bellow. The library has published no register of the collection, but a working list of holdings is available in the library, an earlier version of which was published in Nault's Saul Bellow: His Works and His Critics, An Annotated International Bibliography. (See Item 162 below.) Since Nault's publication in 1977, however, the library has obtained additional material and has rearranged some of the earlier collection, making Nault's list incomplete and inaccurate.

The Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, has a small collection of manuscripts, typescripts and galley proofs, some showing the author's revisions and emendations. Bellow's permission is required to examine the manuscripts.

In addition, some Bellow documents, letters, correspondence to Bellow, and memorabilia are included in the following libraries and special collections. Most of these collections consist of fewer than five items.

University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt Library
University of Virginia [Charlottesville] Library.
     Robert Wooster Stallman Papers, 1935–1962. Part of the library's Barrett Collection of American Literature.
University of Wyoming, Archives–American Heritage Center.
     Harry Barnard Papers, 1925–1977.
Vassar College Library
Washington University [St. Louis, MO] Library
     Modern English and American Literary Papers, 1950–1968.