Epilogue: The Devil in Disguise

Abstract

When Saul Bellow moved to New York, in the late 1930s, he was taken up by the most important group of 'cultural critics' of mid-century America, the Partisan Review intellectuals: 'They thought that I was a kid from the sticks, from Chicago, who showed some promise and might develop into something' (Bellow, 315). The 'promise' they saw seems to have had much to do with the young Bellow's taste for both modern literature and (briefly) in the loosely textured Marxism then in vogue among these intellectuals. Eventually, however, Bellow and PR went separate ways, with Bellow choosing to be the 'cat who walked by himself' (308), and one suspects that he was put off by what we might today call a certain 'theoretical' cast to the 'Partisan Review heavyweights,' those early jugglers of great twentieth-century-isms.