After reading all the articles, book reviews, movie reviews, and essays in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Non-Fiction I never got the sense that Bellow was enjoying himself writing this stuff. Even the Nobel Prize lecture is dull. There’s just too much “going through the motions” in much of this work. I found out that Bellow’s favorite American writer is Theodore Dreiser. And Bellow once roomed with Ralph Ellison.
Arranged chronologically, the pieces in this collection show the range of interests Bellow is willing to write about. He has mixed feelings about Philip Roth but doesn’t have much to say about other contemporary writers. The only time Bellow shows some emotion is when Gunter Grass attacks him for not being more political. GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
THE FIFTIES AND BEFORE
Spanish Letter
Illinois Journey
The University as Villian
The Sharp Edge of Life
Laughter in the Ghetto:On Sholom Aleichem
Dreiser and the Triumph of Art
Hemingway and the Image of Man
Man Underground: On Ralph Ellison
The 1,001 Afternoons of Ben Hecht
The Swamp of Prosperity: On Philip Roth
The Writer and the Audience
Distractions of a Fiction Writer
Deep Readers of the World, Beware!
A Talk with the Yellow Kid
THE SIXTIES
The Sealed Treasure
On Jewish Storytelling
Up From the Pushcart: On Abraham Cahan
Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Fiction
At the Movies
On Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The Writer As a Moralist
Beatrice Webb’s America
Recent Fiction: A Tour of Inspection
Barefoot Boy: On Yevgeny Yevtushenko
My Man Bummidge
The Thinking Man’s Waste Land
Cloister Culture
Israel: The Six-Day War
Skepticism and the Depth of Life
THE SEVENTIES
On America: Remarks at the U.S. Cultural Center in Tel Aviv
New York: World-Famous Impossibility
Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology
A World Too Much With Us
An Interview with Myself
The Nobel Lecture
Americans Who Are Also Jews: Upon Receiving the Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League
The Day They Signed the Treaty
THE EIGHTIES
In the Days of Mr Roosevelt
Reflections on Alexis de Tocqueville: A Seminar at the University of Chicago
My Paris
Foreword to The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
The Civilized Barbarian Reader
A Jewish Writer in America: A Lecture
Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is
THE NINETIES AND AFTER
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About
Writers, Intellectual, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence
Papuans and Zulus
Alone in Mixed Company
Ralph Ellison in Tivoli
Literature: The Next Chapter
Wit Irony Fun Games
Vermont: The Good Place
Winter in Tuscany
Before I Go Away: A Words and Images Interview with Norman Manea
“I Got a Scheme!”: With Philip Roth
Coda: Why Not?
Acknowledgments and Editors Note
Index