Birthdays: Saul Bellow, Maurice Sendak

Solomon “Saul” Bellow (1915-2005)

Author, professor

Recipient, Guggenheim Fellowship (1948); National Book Award (1954, 1965, 1971); Fellow of the National Academy of Arts (1969); Recipient, The Pulitzer Prize and The Nobel Prize for Literature (1976); the National Medal of Arts (1988)

Born in Canada to Russian immigrant parents, Bellow grew up in Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. He was a WPA writer in the late 1930s, then joined the merchant marine as World War II broke out.

A 1948 Guggenheim Fellowship paid for a year in Paris, where Bellow had a sudden creative breakthrough leading the the publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953. He remained a writer’s writer, holding a succession of teaching posts, into the 1970s; then he hit the jackpot, popularly and critically. A number of his novels became bestsellers; he won all the glittering prizes the world had to offer. He continued teaching, holding posts at Yale, Princeton, Bard, Boston and the University of Chicago, until late in life.

Bellow’s personal life was shambolic; he married five times and divorced four. He fathered four children over four decades; the last was born when Bellow was 84 years old.

Henry Bemis Books has one of Bellow’s later works in stock:

Bellow, Saul, More Die of Heartbreak (William Morrow, 1st ed., 1st printing, 1987). ISBN 0-688-06935-5. “I am a phoenix,” one character says, “who runs after arsonists.” A sex farce about two midwestern academics by the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner (1915-2005). Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, very good condition. HBB price: $120.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

Children’s author and illustrator

Recipient, The Hans Christian Andersen Medal; the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award; the Caldecott Medal; the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for Children’s Literature; the National Book Award; the National Medal of Arts

Maurice Sendak was one of three kids in a Jewish immigrant family largely wiped out by the Holocaust. Inspired to become an illustrator by seeing Disney’s Fantasia, Sendak drew the stories of others until the 1960s. His breakthrough came with Where The Wild Things Are (1963). He recalled one young fan’s reaction:

A little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters – sometimes very hastily – but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said: 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

Sendak modeled his famed monsters after relatives: “They were unkempt; their teeth were horrifying. Hair unraveling out of their noses." Notoriously spiky (of e-books, he said, "F*** them is what I say; I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future... they may well be. I will be dead, I won’t give a s***!”; of a fan, he recalled, “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ I wanted to kill her.”), it bothered him not in the least that his book, In the Night Kitchen, is among the kids' books most banned from libraries in this century.

To please his parents, Sendak never told them of his fifty-year relationship with psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, who died in 2007.

Henry Bemis Books currently has two Sendak works in stock:

Selma Lanes, a Sendak friend and children's books' editor and author, combines a biography of the artist and a visual survey of his work in The Art of Maurice Sendak, a large, lavishly illustrated book complete with foldouts of Sendak's sketches and storyboards for his books. Harry Abrams, the art book publisher gave this volume the full treatment, which makes it a must-have for kids-at-heart and visual arts fans of every sort.

Selma G. Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (1993 ed., hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, one slight tear on back edge, 278 pp., 165 black-and-white, 94 color illustrations, ISBN 0-819-8063-0, 12" x 11", very good condition). Your price: US $75.

We also have George MacDonald, The Golden Key (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967; 2d ed., 1996; illustrations by Maurice Sendak, afterword by W. H. Auden. 85 pp. hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, Library of Congress catalog card number 67-10391. Small octavo, very good condition). Your price: US $75.