Countless writers aspire to contribute something lasting to literature. We labor over drafts. We seek innovative forms. We push ourselves to evoke particularities in tone, plot, character, circumstance, and word choice. Yet in these various pursuits, we might overlook what also endures: literary references.
M. Allen Cunningham on the way his fundamentalist evangelical upbringing formed him as a writer, delivering him an awareness of narrative and how story shapes our lives.
In the conclusion to his season-long exploration of Saul Bellow’s work, Daniel Wallace tackles the sticky problem of Bellow’s endings, what happens to characters over a 50-year career, and how the author’s nonfiction illuminates his talent for storytelling and argument—perhaps even moreso than the novels.
In this two-part essay, Daniel Wallace devotes himself to the work of Saul Bellow for a season. Total immersion in Bellow’s progress as a writer reveals the perplexing philosophical problems at the heart of many of the novels, the difference between early and later books, and the unadulterated beauty of Bellow’s paragraphs.
