In an essay on Saul Bellow in these pages in 2018, concurrent with the appearance of volume two of Zachary Leader’s comprehensive biography, Dominic Green wrote that “The academy has shoved his novels down the memory hole. Bellow is off the syllabus, and has been since before today’s undergraduates were born” (“Mr. Bellow’s Planet,” November 2018). While that is generally true, I might add the following observations. At the 2018 American Literature Association convention in San Francisco, a crowd of perhaps twenty-five people attended the panel of the Saul Bellow Society, where I presented a paper on the Harlem Renaissance novelist Rudolph Fisher’s probable influence on his work. By May 2023, at the ala convention in Boston, the panelists (three, including me) outnumbered the audience members (two). Bellow in 1994 had been the target of one of the earliest modern, multipronged cancellation attempts. But the force of his personality and the esteem in which he was held by so many people, combined with his eloquent defense of himself in The New York Times of March 10, 1994, seem to have kept the full-scale cancellation at bay. In 2018, everyone knew Bellow was out of favor, but by 2023, after the upheavals of the intervening years, perhaps there was a sense that he simply no longer had much to offer. But being regarded as such might be a precondition for a comeback.

Yet if that Bellow revival is to ever happen, it probably will not be ushered in by Gerald