I.
Ralph Ellison’s work continues to generate new scholarly work at an impressive clip. Having recently edited a 35-essay collection on him (2021) and co-authored a 23,000-word annotated bibliography (2024, under review), I can attest that Ellison Studies is flourishing; the quantity of impressive scholarship published 2021-25 is daunting. But the first step toward establishing the contours of his posthumous reputation and orienting its discourse was the recognition of the volume and importance of his writing as a public intellectual and the setting aside of lingering, decades-old questions about being a novelist who published only one novel.[1] Saul Bellow’s preface to The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995) is a crucial text at this juncture, appearing in the year after Ellison’s death in the first of several high-profile posthumous publications. To be sure, Ellison was a public intellectual since 1937, and the question of having only published one novel sounds today like a dusty, fussy, pseudo-problem that nobody cares about.[2] But it did not always, and part of the reason the question feels dated today is because of the way Saul Bellow changed the conversation.
It may seem obvious at first glance that Bellow should have written the preface. But it’s anything but obvious. In fact, it is enigmatic. In retrospect, it looks like a perfect fit. But it was far from preordained, and in its moment, it was a bold, counterintuitive decision made by Joe Fox, Ellison’s editor at Random House, of which Modern Library was (and is) a subsidiary. By writing the preface to The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison in 1995, Bellow almost single-handedly buried the stubborn matter of Ellison’s modest novelistic output by addressing it in the manner that he did, clearing the way for the thriving field of Ellison Studies today.[3]
Albert Erskine, Ellison’s editor at Random House for forty years, died in 1993 and was succeeded by Joe Fox, a wily old pro. After Ellison died in 1994, Fox thought it necessary to bring out an edition of Ellison’s essays as soon as possible and also thought it imperative that Saul Bellow should write the preface.
Bellow was certainly a viable choice, but was one among many, and not necessarily an obvious one. He was at that moment embroiled in a scandal resulting from the reception of a remark (his infamous Papuans and Zulus remark – about which, more later) that he made in an interview (back in 1988), prefiguring the kind of cancellations that would proliferate across the 2010s and early 20s, although the cancellation concept was not entrenched yet and Bellow’s reputation still towered.
Social media did not exist yet, and the idea that someone’s reputation could be sunk by a remark had not yet become commonplace, although it had happened to politicians and media figures, usually for saying something unambiguously offensive on a microphone in public. Nevertheless, a firestorm erupted for Bellow, and if one were writing a history of cancellation, this could get an early chapter. Since he was not an obvious choice for the preface for other reasons, Fox’s invitation remains mysterious and something like a flash of genius.
That is one of the points of origin for this investigation. I said to myself one day, wait, Bellow must have been asked to write this preface shortly after his rhetorical questions blew up – and sure enough, that was the case. It seemed very strange, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. The other point of origin is a question that nagged me as I’ve re-read the preface over the years: why doesn’t he say anything about the essays themselves? It took me a while to figure out what he was up to; that’s how much the issue had faded.
Bellow had not been close to Ellison for thirty years or so. He had never been a Random House author and so did not owe any favors to the company. He did not seem to know Fox too well, if at all. He addressed him by his complete name in their brief correspondence (“Dear Joe Fox”), which suggests to me that they barely knew each other or perhaps had never met. But he had once been close friends with Ellison, especially during the 1950s when they lived together in a big old house when they taught at Bard College. The similarity of their early 1950s novels, the distinctive American voices of their narrators in those novels, their determination to save and revivify the embattled genre (recently declared dead!), and the way they form complementary angles of a sort in the American literary landscape of the early Cold War has been the subject of a fair amount of scholarship.[4]
While Bellow and Ellison were good friends from the late 40s through the early 60s, they had long since drifted far apart. The last letter from Ellison in the Bellow archive at the University of Chicago is a 1976 note congratulating Bellow on winning the Nobel Prize. The last letter from Bellow in the Ellison archive is from a few years earlier. They probably last saw each other in 1992 at a series of panel discussions hosted by Partisan Review at Rutgers University on writers and intellectuals in the wake of the collapse of the Eastern bloc. It is unclear when they last saw each other before that. By contrast, in the early days of their friendship, they would visit each other’s apartments and go fishing together in Long Island Sound.
Bellow is inextricable from Ralph Ellison’s fate, and vice-versa. They book-end each other’s careers. Oddly enough, around the time in the 1940s that Ellison dumped Henry Volkening as an agent, Volkening picked up Bellow as a client. Bellow wrote an influential review of Invisible Man (noting some of its flaws), but more importantly, he was on the committee (with Howard Mumford Jones, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin) that awarded the National Book Award to Ellison’s novel in 1953, forever changing Ellison’s life and career.
Yet Bellow ultimately was a different sort of writer – the author of fourteen novels, a play, a memoir, many short stories (many more than Ellison), long short stories that are not quite novellas (a Bellow specialty), and plenty of nonfiction. Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 (an award that almost certainly would have gone to Ellison at some point had he published even a mediocre follow-up to Invisible Man). With such novelistic volume and range, Bellow was well-positioned to defend Ellison for only having published one novel. Bellow’s novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift were still revered as formidable contemporary classics. Henderson the Rain King and Seize the Day and The Dean’s December were well-respected. Infamous as Mr. Sammler’s Planet was and is, it had just been republished by Penguin Classics with a 6000-word introduction by Stanley Crouch.
Bellow knew that the question of why Ellison’s output lagged behind his (and others) and whether Ellison could really be considered a novelist had to be put to rest. He intuited that Fox had offered him the golden opportunity – perhaps the only opportunity – to do so. Remarkably, if not startlingly, he says nothing about the essays themselves!
Thus, the first posthumously published Ellison book,[5] The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, opens with Bellow defensively addressing the question of Ellison’s output. Bellow relays a prescient 1953 critique of Ellison – leveled by none other than Georges Simenon (1903-1989), author of 192 novels under his own name and more under other names:
In 1953 at a Bard College Symposium dinner attended by foreign celebrities, Georges Simenon, who sat at our table, asked Ellison how many novels he had written, and when he learned that there was only one he said, “To be a novelist one must produce many novels. Ergo, you are not a novelist.”
The author of hundreds of books, writing and speaking at high speed, was not in the habit of pausing to weigh his words. Einstein, a much deeper thinker, had said in a reply to a “sociable” lady’s questions about quantum theory (why, under such and such conditions, was there only one quantum?), “But isn’t one a lot, madam?”[6]
Thus, the witty opening salvo in the formation of Ellison’s posthumous reputation was fired by a productive novelist defending Ellison’s relatively low output for a writer of his stature.
Indeed, perhaps prompted by The Collected Essays, questions seemed to shift away from strictly literary ones to a broader understanding of Ellison – by the professoriate in aggregate – as a public intellectual. Ronald A. T. Judy writes in his introduction to “Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years,” a special issue of boundary 2 (Summer 2003) that proved to be a sharp turning point in Ellison Studies, “it is now clear that Ellison was not only the author of one of the most celebrated English-language North American novels of this century but was also one of the major intellectuals of the middle and later twentieth century.”[7] Undoubtedly, part of this development also had to do with Ross Posnock’s chapter on Ellison (and Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Albert Murray) in his landmark 1998 study Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Posnock’s book was the first, as far as I can tell, to subject one of Ellison’s essays (“The Little Man at Chehaw Station”) to critical analysis. That same essay would be the object of a fascinating inquiry by Hortense Spillers in that same 2003 issue of boundary 2. Today Ellison’s nonfiction is written about all the time, but that was not happening at all in the early or mid-90s.
II.
Somewhere in Bellow’s mind when he accepted the 1995 assignment could have been John W. Aldridge’s rather wound-up 1964 essay “The Price of Being Taken Seriously,” the subhead of which is “the critics may make him a novelist but they cannot make him write” – a very obvious, ungenerous, lengthy, and mean-spirited attack on Ellison – in all but name – in the New York Times.[8] Aldridge, then a professor at the University of Michigan, was big mad, as the kids say, that someone wasn’t doing what he wanted them to do. Yet his question had an audience. Why did Ellison only publish one novel? And the question circulated and resurfaced for years.
When Ellison gave an interview to the Washington Post in 1982, he was defensive about the issue when asked about it, stating “It would be easy enough to write other fiction, to put out several books. You don’t – I don’t – write to satisfy other people. You do certain things and then you do other things, and you don’t always publish what you write.”[9] Interviewer Lynn Darling notes that this answer was given with “some irritation.” By 1994, Bellow had apparently had enough of the question that had plagued his friend, and he had the determination – and the credibility – to kill it.
The key figure for understanding how Bellow managed to write the preface for Ellison’s essays is Joe Fox (1926-1995). Fox was one of the great old-time editors, a classic mid-century New York character and eccentric, and a Random House employee of 35 years. Perhaps not as legendary as Albert Erskine, who had edited William Faulkner before he edited Ellison, Fox was no slouch, and had edited Philip Roth, James Salter, Truman Capote, Mavis Gallant, and many other prominent authors before becoming Ellison’s editor in 1993, after Erskine’s death. He attended Harvard after service in the Marine Corps and was a scuba diver. Later in life, according to Samuel S. Vaughan, “[Fox] often went to parties with Fran Liebowitz, sharing her gifts for wit, storytelling, and serial smoking. His office was renowned for being designated – by him – a smoking area…. He sat behind a towering Pisa of old, yellowing copies of the New York Times and its Book Review, defying gravity and anyone to see him behind the smokestack.”[10] Don’t underestimate the literary intuition of a guy like that. (I wonder if, in that leaning tower of old copies of the New York Times Book Review, was the September 6, 1964 issue with John Aldridge’s essay in it.)
Fox seems to have contacted Bellow out of the blue in 1994. Fox wrote to Fanny Ellison, in the course of a letter in which he explains some basic details about The Collected Essays volume – such as that John F. Callahan will be its editor, “I’m hoping that Saul Bellow will write an introduction to the book.”[11] Bellow did not seem to know Fox at all, as inferred from Bellow’s addressing him in his submission of the preface as “Dear Joe Fox.”[12] A handwritten note signed by Fanny Ellison at the bottom of page one tells Bellow (or maybe not, see below), “Joe Fox has died. Fanny would appreciate whatever your inclination to write.”[13] I do not believe that this note or a version of it was ever sent to Bellow.
Fox died on November 30, 1995, and the book was published three weeks later. That would not have been nearly enough time for this to play out in terms of the pace of publishing, regardless of how it appears in the archive – which is that while Fox has died, go ahead and write whatever you want. This note is on a clean typescript almost identical to the published preface. As such, this instance raises an interesting question about the legibility of an archive without context. It has been suggested to me by an expert on Fanny Ellison that this note was not intended for Bellow but was written by Fanny for posterity, as she was inclined in this period to write such notes. I find this compelling. I would guess that Random House had to have received Bellow’s preface by September, at the latest, for December publication.
III.
In March 1994, Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, whose paths had intertwined for decades, crossed paths again, in a sense. In that month, March ’94, they had very different experiences of being featured in The New Yorker. In the March 7th issue, Bellow took a considerable hit. Here Alfred Kazin dredged up the old, infamous rhetorical questions attributed to Bellow by James Atlas in 1988: “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Who is the Proust of the Papuans?” To read these questions as automatically repugnant and racist, I believe, would be disingenuous and obtuse. And yet many were (and are) determined to do just that. Bellow is obviously making a complicated point about bourgeois modernity and forms of novelistic discourse its conditions made possible. From another angle, implicit in the question is the knotty connection between empire and modernity and the novel.[14] To be clear, Bellow did himself no favors. It was a bad example, as the Russians have no Proust, and neither do the English, but nobody has a Shakespeare, and so on. A glib remark, a point too sophisticated for the general public to be framed in such an offhand way, and phrased so as to be maximally explosive did explode as such. Kazin breathed new life into the 1988 comment, cementing it in cultural consciousness. (Kazin, like Bellow, also connects with Ellison’s early and late career.) A few days after Kazin’s piece appeared in The New Yorker, Bellow published a rebuttal in The New York Times, titled “Papuans and Zulus,” in which he tried to distance himself from the quotation:
I had come under attack in the press and elsewhere for a remark I was alleged to have made about the Zulus and the Papuans. I had been quoted as saying that the Papuans had had no Proust and that the Zulus had not as yet produced a Tolstoy, and this was taken as an insult to Papuans and Zulus, and as a proof that I was at best insensitive and at worst an elitist, a chauvinist, a reactionary and a racist – in a word, a monster. Nowhere in print, under my name, is there a single reference to Papuans or Zulus. The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin, the result of a misunderstanding that occurred (they always do occur) during an interview. I can’t remember who the interviewer was. Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and pre literate societies.[15]
Bellow defended himself with aplomb in this piece, which is smart and interesting for other reasons too.
A week or so after Kazin’s piece and Bellow’s response, Ellison had a very different experience with The New Yorker: in the March 14th issue, David Remnick published a charming, laudatory report on Ellison’s 80th birthday dinner at Le Périgord (1964-2017), one of the classic upper-east side French restaurants, which was attended by a variety of old friends, including Fox. Ellison died six weeks later after the rapid onset of pancreatic cancer, a diagnosis unknown at the time of the party. Remnick’s report was to be the last piece published on Ellison while he was alive.
This completely different experience with The New Yorker – in its very next issue – proves Ellison did not need Bellow’s imprimatur or anything like that. Far from forgotten or in need of a publicity boost or the co-sign of another formidable writer, Ellison had the most prominent young reporter in the U.S. write up his birthday party with elegant panache. Remnick was not yet the editor of The New Yorker, but his career was on a vertical upswing after his widely esteemed coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union in The Washington Post in preceding years.
Ellison went out on top, so to speak. Bellow on the other hand was far from on top when, a few weeks later, in late April 1994, Fox wrote to Fanny Ellison suggesting Bellow as the introducer for Ellison’s Collected Essays, and she must have assented. Fox ended up catching Bellow at just the right moment – Bellow nearly died a few months later that summer from eating a poisonous fish and had a difficult (if psychiatrically intriguing) rehabilitation.[16] There does not seem to be a record of Bellow’s reaction to Fox’s request to write the preface, but it must have felt like an affirmation to be asked to write such a prominent statement on behalf of an old (if recently distant) friend at a moment when he himself was in the midst of controversy.
Who would have been a better choice than Bellow? On paper, maybe a dozen writers would have. After all, Bellow is not particularly appreciated as an essayist (although many of his essays are fascinating and a few are masterpieces). His first collection of essays, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, had just been published in January 1994 (copyright date 1993). By contrast, Ellison’s first essay collection Shadow and Act was published in 1964 and had a significant cultural impact; it was even published in a drug-store paperback edition by Signet (list price: 95 cents). It seems to me that people thought of (and still think of) Ellison as a non-fiction writer in a way that they still do not think about Bellow. Bellow-as-essayist today seems to my mind a rich field of inquiry, although in 1994, I wonder to what extent people would have thought so. Not especially, I think, as It All Adds Up probably had just introduced people to the idea of Bellow-as-essayist.[17]
From a marketing angle, it also might have made sense to consider a younger African American writer, such as perhaps Charles Johnson, who had recently won the National Book Award (1990) for fiction, was an accomplished essayist, and had expressed appreciation for Ellison; Stanley Crouch, friend/acolyte of Ellison whose first collection of essays and reviews, Notes of a Hanging Judge, made a substantial impact a few years earlier and who was becoming a frequent television presence; or James Alan McPherson, a superb essayist himself,[18] whose 1970 interview-essay of/with Ellison, “Indivisible Man,” is included in The Collected Essays. Toni Morrison, whose connection to Ellison is often misunderstood or assumed to be other than it was, would have been a great choice as well. Yet the tenuous, iffy, unlikely Fox-to-Bellow invitation happened, and Bellow delivered, effectively shutting down the question that had nagged Ellison’s reputation.
The 1995 preface and 1998 personal essay on Ellison did basically nothing for Bellow’s reputation, which is still haunted by the rhetorical questions about authorship in pre-modern societies. When Bellow died in 2005, they were dutifully brought to the fore by the cultural commissars. When Slate fielded comments of a paragraph or two from 18 writers of different generations about Bellow in the wake of his death, Hilton Als squandered the opportunity to say something interesting by huffingly-puffingly repeating the rhetorical questions and addressing them in the most obtuse way. Stanley Crouch, the only other African American writer in this same Slate feature, said something much more intriguing, preserving for history a notion for a book that Bellow had – now a shadow book, in the term coined by Kevin Young. Crouch, who wrote the introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet a decade earlier, wrote for Slate that Bellow
was considering writing a novel based on what he had made of the young James Baldwin in Paris, the masterful and burdened Ralph Ellison in New York, and Harold Washington, who invited him to his office and talked about books with him while mayor of Chicago. Bellow had very pointed observations about each man and felt that, if he could figure out how to give it form, “That would really catch them off guard, wouldn’t it?” he laughed.[19]
What Bellow would have said about Baldwin and Washington in such a shadow book surely would have been insightful, but what he would have made of a fictional Ellison might have surpassed the brilliance of Abe Ravelstein, Artur Sammler, Charlie Citrine, or Moses Herzog. Incidentally, I think Ellison has a cameo of sorts in Humboldt’s Gift – the African American composer at the Princeton party could allude to Ellison, who after all studied to be a composer under William L. Dawson. Ellison and Bellow used to hang out at the parties following the Gauss Lectures at Princeton in the early 50s.
But my claim about the prospective grandeur of an Ellison character in a novel by Bellow rests on the following intriguing claim by David Mikics, in his 2016 book Bellow’s People: “Bellow thought about Ellison’s work with an intensity he gave to no other of his fellow authors, at a time when he was still figuring out his own path.”[20] Bellow created memorable characters of figures who intrigued him (such as Alan Bloom/Abe Ravelstein), working their idiosyncrasies through his imagination, but I dare say Ellison might have been too vast to get a handle on.[21]
Incidentally, the now-standard image of Bellow as a fashion plate could be the result of Ellison’s influence. Mikics also claims that only after – and because of – sharing a house with the sartorially exquisite Ellison, Bellow, who formerly would show up to teach in jeans and a t-shirt (can you imagine?), became the dapper dresser familiar from interviews, photos, and book jackets later in life.
IV.
When Bellow submitted his 2000-word preface in late 1995, he wrote, “Dear Joe Fox – You said you wanted me to be brief – if you’d like a little more, let me know.” Why would Fox have wanted Bellow to be brief? Bellow’s essay can be divided roughly into three sections – 1) his refutation of Georges Simenon’s critique of Ellison, 2) his recollection of being housemates with Ellison in Tivoli, New York in the late 1950s (expanded upon in the 1998 essay), and 3) a significant quotation from “Indivisible Man,” James Alan McPherson’s long 1970 interview with Ellison in The Atlantic Monthly – the only piece from The Collected Essays that Bellow quotes from. I would have liked to have known Bellow’s opinions on much else in the book. What did Bellow think of Ellison’s famous duel with Irving Howe (in “The World and the Jug”); his spirited exchange with Stanley Edgar Hyman (in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”); his perceptive essay on Stephen Crane; his personal essay “An Extravagance of Laughter” (which would have appealed to Bellow’s comic spirit); his finest work as a literary critic, “Society, Morality and the Novel”; or “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” on the topsy-turviness of unstable American hierarchies? (You know the author of “Looking for Mr. Green” would have understood it.)
The Collected Essays contains 60 pieces by Ellison, and Bellow mentions exactly one (“Indivisible Man,” the hybrid thing he did with James Alan McPherson). But Bellow was like a quarterback spotting an open receiver far down the field when he also has the option to run the ball himself. He could have gotten way into the weeds, commenting on Ellison’s duels with Howe and Hyman and Baraka and all that, or commenting on Ellison’s essays about the Oklahoma City of his youth, or on the topsy-turviness of American hierarchies, but instead he knew what he had to do, and took the long view – that for Ellison, with Invisible Man, one novel, as with Einstein’s quantum, is enough. By ignoring the masterful essays themselves, he somehow foregrounded them and cleared the way for a new appreciation of them by killing the tired old question. After personal recollections, he closes out with e.e. cummings on Buffalo Bill – a poem that reminded him of Ellison.
Incidentally, Bellow was also selected to deliver a memorial statement for Ellison at the autumn meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where members eulogize other members who died in the preceding year. Bellow submitted his preface to Ellison’s Collected Essays to be read in absentia, as he was still recovering from the poison fish. Joseph Mitchell read it for him. (Mitchell would have been an equally good choice to write a memorial oration; he knew Ellison well.) Bellow could have easily said sorry, I can’t do it; I’m recovering from poisoning. Anyone would have understood. But he wanted that elite audience of some of the most prominent writers, artists, and cultural opinion makers to hear his defense of his old friend.
Notes
[1] Early paragraphs in this essay bear resemblance to two early paragraphs (350 words) in the chapter “Critical Reputation, 1994-2020” by Paul Devlin and Robert J. Butler, Ralph Ellison in Context, ed. Paul Devlin (Cambridge UP, 2021), 313-26. This essay is a significant expansion of those paragraphs, which were mine and not Professor Butler’s. I presented an intermediate version of this essay on the Saul Bellow Society’s panel “Saul Bellow and Other Writers” at the American Literature Association convention in Boston in 2023.
[2] The question of why Ellison never published his follow-up novel is different from the question of whether one qualifies as an important novelist after having published only one novel. The question of why he did not publish what has become known as the Hickman Novel, portions of which were published as Juneteenth (1999) and Three Days Before the Shooting. . . (2010) is a cottage industry in which I have participated. I was talking with Charles Johnson once, and he said Ellison needed a short follow-up novel to break the spell of Invisible Man. I said, “you mean like Seize the Day?” (Seize the Day is Bellow’s short follow-up to the monumental achievement of The Adventures of Augie March.) He said, “exactly.”
[3] Incidentally, I will not be discussing Bellow’s fascinating later essay, “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1998 and was subsequently collected in There is Simply Too Much to Think About (2016), the most complete collection of Bellow’s nonfiction. Superb as that essay is for understanding the Ellison-Bellow friendship in the late 1950s, I do not believe it had much to do with Ellison’s posthumous reputation.
[4] See for instance, Johannes Voelz, “The Liberal Imagination Revisited: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and the Crisis of Democracy,” The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-century American Literature, ed. Leslie Bow and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford UP, 2022), 337-55.
[5] There would be five more: Juneteenth (1999), Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), Three Days Before the Shooting. . . (2010), The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison (2019), and Ralph Ellison: Photographer (2022).
[6] Saul Bellow, “Preface,” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), ix.
[7] Ronald A.T. Judy, “Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years,” boundary 2 30.2 (Summer 2003), 2. Judy’s introduction and the special issue itself have the same title.
[8] John Aldridge, “The Price of Being Taken Seriously,” The New York Times Book Review, September 6, 1964, BR1, 21. The second paragraph in the second column on p. 21 seems to be making explicit to the reader that Ellison is Aldridge’s target, in case anyone did not already know.
[9] Lynn Darling, “Ralph Ellison, The Quiet Legend,” The Washington Post, April 20, 1982. The subhead here is “In the Long, Strong Shadow of ‘Invisible Man.’” This interview is perhaps the only major one not collected in Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995).
[10] Samuel S. Vaughan, “Joseph Fox 1926-1995,” The Century Association Yearbook (New York: The Century Association, 1996), 271-73.
[11] Joe Fox to Fanny Ellison, April 28, 1994, Part II: Box II, 32, F.11, Ralph Ellison Papers, Library of Congress.
[12] Saul Bellow to Joe Fox, handwritten note on undated copy of typescript, Part II: Box II, 43, F.3, Ralph Ellison Papers, Library of Congress.
[13] Fanny Ellison, note at the bottom of the page, Ibid.
[14] For interesting thoughts on empire and modernity, see Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia UP, 2015).
[15] Saul Bellow, “Papuans and Zulus,” The New York Times, March 10, 1994. This also appears in Bellow’s There is Simply Too Much to Think About.
[16] See Bellow’s letter to John Hunt of June 18, 1995, in The Selected Letters of Saul Bellow.
[17] Unlike the title of his posthumous essay collection There is Simply Too Much to Think About, It All Adds Up sounds like a somewhat cynical title for an essay collection, as if to say, I have all these stray pieces lying around, I might as well put them in a book. The title does not suggest “I hereby take my stand as an essayist.” It’s more like “I guess there are enough pieces now to justify a book.”
[18] See McPherson’s posthumous essay collection, On Becoming an American Writer (2023). McPherson’s knotty essay “Gravitas” is partially about Ellison and was started as a memorial tribute to Ellison.
[19] Stanley Crouch, contribution to “Saul Bellow: Novelists and Critics Remember an American Master,” Slate, April 8, 2005.
[20] David Mikics, Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 74.
[21] I do not accept the idea that King Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King is based on Ellison. Dahfu feels like one of many stand-ins for Bellow himself.