There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction

“Bellow’s nonfiction has the same strengths as his stories and novels: a dynamic responsiveness to character, place, and time (or era) . . . And you wonder—what other highbrow writer, or indeed lowbrow writer has such a reflexive grasp of the street, the machine, the law courts, the rackets?” —Martin Amis, The New York Times Book Review
 
One of the supreme fiction writers of the twentieth century, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow was also deeply insightful in his lesser-known roles as essayist, critic, and lecturer. Gathered together in this stunning compilation, Bellow’s vast range of nonfiction reveals the same wit, daring, and wisdom that distinguish The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and other masterly novels. In There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, as in the novels, the twentieth century comes fiercely to life through Bellow’s unrivaled human understanding and singular style.
 
Benjamin Taylor, editor of the acclaimed Saul Bellow: Letters, joins Bellow’s better-known essays to previously uncollected works selected from his criticism, interviews, speeches, and other reflections. Featuring Bellow’s commentary on such fellow writers as Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and J. D. Salinger, a remembrance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, dispatches from Paris, Spain, and Israel, and indelible portraits of his hometown, Chicago, this collection brings together writing from every phase of his career. There Is Simply Too Much to Think About is a guided tour of the twentieth century—what we did, suffered, survived—conducted by one of modern life’s most inspiring minds.

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) is the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift. The Nobel Prize in Literature was also awarded to him in 1976 “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” In 1990, Mr. Bellow was presented the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. He also received the National Medal of Arts.
 
Benjamin Taylor, editor, is the author of Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, named a Best Book of 2012 by the New Yorker, and of two award-winning novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. Proust: The Future’s Secret, his contribution to the Yale Jewish Lives series, will be published in autumn 2015. He previously edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times and Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. A faculty member in The New School’s Graduate School of Writing, Taylor also teaches in the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.