The Dean's December

By Saul Bellow

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Saul Bellow's 1982 novel follows Albert Corde, a dean at a Chicago college, who travels to Bucharest in winter with his wife, Minna, an astronomer, as her mother lies dying under Communist rule. Waiting in a cold apartment, Corde thinks back on the uproar he caused in Chicago over a student's murder and his magazine articles on the city's poverty and crime.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”