It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

In this collection of more than thirty essays, published in The New York Times, Esquire and The New Republic, the vast range of Saul Bellow's nonfiction is made abundantly clear. In Bellow's capable hands, a single essay can range fluidly across topics as various as the talents of President Roosevelt, the economic narrative of Jay Gatsby, and childhood adventures in Chicago.

In It All Adds Up, Bellow turns his view away from the sparkling characters of his novels, and towards the conditions and qualities of his own experience of writing and living.