Abstract
ABSTRACT Saul Bellow wrote “Leaving the Yellow House” with a setting in Utah although it is based on his sojourn in Nevada in 1955 and 1956. The location at Sego Desert Lake is historically significant in relation to the theme, which concerns economic networks of exchange, notably gift exchange (potlatch). Central to the narrative is the treatment of native Americans, past and present, and the gifts they gave to the early Mormon settlers, which rebounded upon them. The protagonist, a self-styled pioneer who relies on gifts that come back to haunt her, is a woman and one of the few in Bellow’s fiction to turn her back on money and status and negotiate an identity outside intellectual and material frames.
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