The Closing of the American Mind is a 1987 book by Allan Bloom, who describes "how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students." He focuses especially upon the "openness" of relativism as leading paradoxically to the great "closing" referenced in the book's title. Bloom argues …
The Dean's December is a 1982 novel by the American author Saul Bellow. The first novel Bellow published after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, it is set in Chicago and Bucharest. The book's main character, Albert Corde, a meditative academic who faces a crisis, accompanies his Romanian-born …
Can one man come to terms with his past in one of the greatest short novels ever written? Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds …
The Victim is a novel by Saul Bellow published in 1947. As in much of Bellow's fiction, the protagonist is a Jewish man in early middle age. Leventhal lives in New York City. While his wife is away on family business, Leventhal is haunted by an old acquaintance who unjustly claims that Leventhal has been the cause of …