Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow reads his fiction

In Saul Bellow At Ease, the Nobel Prize-winning author speaks with the Columbia, Maryland, community in February 1986 at Howard Community College, reading from Henderson the Rain King and referencing other works, such as Herzog and Seize the Day, as he responds to audience queries about his early influences, intersections of life and literature, the harmonies of storytelling, the pleasures and pains of writing, the impact of criticism, and the comic imagination. Then, in an impromptu press conference with area journalists, Bellow shares his views on the possibilities of fiction and the creative imagination to help us orient ourselves within our personal and ancestral histories, on public life after the Nobel Prize, the effects of TV on what used to be "the living room," and critical thinking as the essence of democracy. A long-time teacher at the University of Chicago, he remarks, "I don't know what I would do without my students, for I'm able to talk with them...about things that matter...matter deeply to me."
For more information about "The Writing Life" and HoCoPoLitSo (the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society), visit www.hocopolitso.org.