Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) - Softcover

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was born in Canada in 1915 and grew up in Chicago. He attended Chicago, Northwestern and Wisconsin universities and had a BSc in Anthropology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, the first American to win the prize since John Steinbeck in 1962. The author of numerous novels, novellas, and stories, he was the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards. He also received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He taught at New York University, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota and was chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

''Family fiction and the fiction-of-ideas: these are the two competing concerns in Bellow's recent work -- with the combination at its most problematic in his last novel, The Dean's December. Here, however, in five shorter works from the past decade, those seemingly contradictory roles -- the darkly comic memoirist, the thorny essayist -- are on more rewarding display, occasionally even blending in a richly charming way...This welcome gathering presents the restless Bellow voice in full cry -- taut, colorful, Talmudic, and large-hearted.'' --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

''[Bellow] is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world.'' --Times (London), praise for the author

''The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists -- William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.'' --Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, praise for the author

''Sharp, erudite, beautifully measured...[Bellow] is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world.'' --Times (London), praise for the author

''If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature.'' --New York Times, praise for the author