Saul Bellow's Good Place
from Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast Hosted by Zachary Leader, Beena Kamlani, HoCoPoLitSo
This episode was researched, produced and narrated by Donna Blackney with production assistance from Sandy Rouse of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Mixing and mastering was done by Alec Pombriant from masters done for Brattleboro Words Trail app for Guilford Sound. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Executive Producer, LIssa Weinmann. Many thanks to Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader, his long-time editor at Viking Penguin Press Beena Kamlani, his friend Larry Simons and the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society for their archival footage of Bellow and help. For more info on Project, visit BrattleboroWords.org. All audio clips of Saul Bellow from The Writing Life with Saul Bellow are reproduced by permission of HoCoPoLitSo, the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, www.hocopolitso.org. To hear the entire interview, visit www.youtube.com/hocopolitso. Excerpt(s) from HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1974, renewed © 1986, 1987 by Saul Bellow. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from HERZOG by Saul Bellow, copyright © 1961, 1963, 1964, renewed 1989, 1991, 1992 by Saul Bellow. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from RAVELSTEIN by Saul Bellow. Copyright © 2000 by Saul Bellow, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. References: The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 uby Zachary Leader. Published by Knopf 2015. The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005 dby Zachary Leader. Published by Knopf 2018. Saul Bellow: Letters, by Saul Bellow (Author), Benjamin Taylor (Editor) Penguin Books 2012 “Vermont: The Good Place” from There Is Simply Too Much To Think About, a collection of essays by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. Penguin Books 2016. Copyright 2015 Janis Bellow. A Race Against Time by Beena Kamlani 2015 https://lithub.com/a-race-against-time-editing-saul-bellows-last-novel/ Episode Photo: Courtesy of the Nobel Prize Music: Part 1: ‘Now or Never’ by Michael Vignola (storyblocks.com) Part 2: ‘Backed Vibes Clean’ by Kevin MacLeod (freemusicarchive.org) ‘Cool Jazz’ by Bobby Cole (storyblocks.com) Part 3: ‘Just A Thought’ by Michael Vignola (storyblocks.com) ‘Empty Days’ by Alan Spiljak (freemusicarchive.org) Part 4: ‘Just A Thought’ by Michael Vignola (storyblocks.com) Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons.Intro voice is Donna Blackney. Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council and the hundreds of volunteers and community members who support this work.
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What this episode covers
Saul Bellow, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of all time, lived and wrote several months of each year in the Brattleboro area for the last 20 plus years of his life. This episode captures the essence of the man and his work through his own words, writings and that of his official biographer, Professor Emeritus Zachary Leader of Roehampton University in London, as well as one of his good friends in Brattleboro, Larry Simons (these last two in exclusive interviews with the Brattleboro Words Trail). A bonus episode to follow features Bellow's longtime editor Beena Kamlani reading her delightful essay about her work with this unparalleled writer. Bellow won a trio of National Book Awards for fiction, a record still unsurpassed, for the Adventures of Augie March in 1954, Herzog in 1965, and Mr. Sandler's Planet in 1971. He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1976 novel Humboldt's Gift and, in 1976, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his full body of work. His life story fills two volumes. In this episode, his biographer (Leader) sums up his stature and relationship to Vermont and reads from Bellow's essay 'Vermont: A Good Place." Bellow's Brattleboro friend Larry Simons talks about their friendship, his work, his last years and how Bellow attended the inaugural Brattleboro Literary Festival in October of 2002 (which has grown to become a celebrated annual event). In spring of 2005, Saul Bellow died at his Boston home, but he loved Vermont so much that Brattleboro became his final resting place at the Shir He-Harim Jewish graveyard at Morningside Cemetery. Chiseled into his headstone are the spines of books and the single word epitaph: Writer.
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