“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”

"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
It All Adds Up (1994)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 3, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of…" by Saul Bellow?

Saul Bellow103

Canadian-born American writer 1915–2005

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: Reengineering the Corporation, 1993, p. 30; cited in: Huey B. Long (1995), New Dimensions in Self-Directed Learning, p. 323

“No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism

“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“Acknowledging continuities between nineteenth century anti-slavery struggles, twentieth century civil rights struggles, twenty-first century abolitionist struggles—and when I say abolitionist struggles I’m referring to the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment, the abolition of the prison industrial complex—acknowledging these continuities requires a challenge to the closures that isolate the freedom movement of the twentieth century from the century preceding and the century following.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

“Driving down child mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in no way a single project, but it can be seen as a unified human accomplishment—maybe even our greatest human achievement, at least for pediatricians and parents.”

Perri Klass (1958) American pediatrician and writer

[Introduction, A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future, https://books.google.com/books?id=fNjVDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=unified&f=false, 13 October 2020, W. W. Norton, 978-0-393-61000-0] (ebook)

“Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony—all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide—the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 57
The Panda's Thumb (1980)