Anybody who wants to discover how an intellectual thought and lived in 20th-century America will always be able to turn to Saul Bellow's novels for a roadmap.

* Anybody who wants to discover how an intellectual thought and lived in 20th-century America will always be able to turn to Saul Bellow's novels for a roadmap. His particular gift of turning everyday matter and Everyman's experience into literature in an inimitable way truly set his mark on the times. First and foremost a humanist, he was a man of the greatest intelligence, with a humor all his own. Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living, a remark Bellow was fond of quoting. Every little detail of life within and around him was examined with scrupulous care for what it had to teach, and the example it offered. The whole stock of the world's ideas was in his head. He also had a perfect touch with language, and his writing is full of phrases, jokes, ironies, observations, and apparent throwaway lines that are dynamite and often landed him in trouble with those of smaller minds than his. It greatly amused him to be criticized as a reactionary, as he knew with the full weight of his personality that he was always holding to a vision of some better life. Bellow is dead at 89. R.I.E