AMERICAN MASTERS: The Adventures of Saul Bellow

By Jennifer Robinson / Web Producer

Published December 16, 2022 at 1:12 PM PST

Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022 at 10:30 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS Video app

Explore the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner’s impact on American literature in the first-ever major documentary on the writer. AMERICAN MASTERS "The Adventures of Saul Bellow" illuminates how Bellow transformed modern literature and navigated through the issues of his time, including race, gender and the Jewish immigrant experience, through rare archival footage and interviews with Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and many others.

Explore Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow's impact on American literature and how he navigated through issues of his time, including race, gender and the Jewish immigrant experience. Featuring interviews with Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and others.

The film traces Bellow's rise to eminence and examines his many identities: reluctant public intellectual, “serial husband,” father, Chicagoan and Jewish American.

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It also sheds light on his willingness to confront social issues, his criticisms of American society and materialism and his provocative political view.

Saul Bellow's novel "The Dean's December," released in 1982, details the blowback a writer faces after publishing an exposé on Chicago's corruption. "You can't live in Chicago without being sharply aware of the presence of this underclass," said Bellow of writing about the city in the 1980s.

Ernest Hemingway was the master of the simple, declarative sentence during his time. By contrast, when Saul Bellow came along, he wrote descriptive sentences full of verbal energy. "This was a great shift in the American notion of what a great prose style was," said Philip Roth.

Salman Rushdie talks about some of his favorite Saul Bellow books in this outtake from "The Adventures of Saul Bellow." Rushdie says, "These are some of the great masterpieces of American literature."

Interviewees:

Martin Amis, novelist
James Atlas, biographer
Adam Bellow, son of Alexandra Tschacbasov and Saul Bellow
Alexandra Bellow, professor of mathematics and ex-wife of Saul Bellow.
Daniel Bellow, son of Susan Glassman and Saul Bellow
Gregory Bellow, son of Anita Goshkin and Saul Bellow
Joel Bellow, nephew of Saul Bellow
Stanley Crouch, culture critic and novelist
Janis Freedman-Bellow, literary scholar and widow of Saul Bellow
Charles Johnson, novelist
Vivian Gornick, author and literary critic
Philip Grew, activist and former student of University of Chicago
Zachary Leader, professor of literature and biographer
Katie Roiphe, author and professor or journalism
Philip Roth, novelist
Salman Rushdie, novelist
Margaret Staats Simmons, journalist
Leon Wieseltier, literary critic
Hana Wirth-Nesher, professor of literature
Ruth Wisse, professor of literature

In this outtake from "The Adventures of Saul Bellow," Philip Roth describes his friendship with and admiration for Bellow, and he Bellow was a "powerhouse" of an author. "There are very few tools that he couldn't pick up and use," Roth said in the final interview he gave before his death in 2018.

Runtime: 90 minutes

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Saul Bellow, Janis Freedman-Bellow and their daugher, Rosie Freedman-Bellow, circa 2000.

Credits:

A production of Ingenue Productions in association with American Masters Pictures. Directed by Asaf Galay. Naama Pyritz and Rachel Engleberg are producers. Aviva Kempner, Anthony McCarten and Kathryn Dietz are executive producers. Michael Kantor is executive producer for AMERICAN MASTERS.

AMERICAN MASTERS: The Adventures of Saul Bellow

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