JAMES WOOD, editor of The Library of America’s Bellow edition, is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God.

For his centennial (June 10, 2015), The Library of America and editor James Wood present the final volume in the definitive edition of Saul Bellow’s complete novels. In the last stage of his unparalleled career—which included winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976—Saul Bellow remained an uproarious comic storyteller, a provocative thinker deeply engaged with the intellectual cross-currents of his time, and a magnificent prose stylist. Gathered here are four shorter works—What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), and The Actual (1997)—along with More Die of Heartbreak (1987), a novel that “changes the way you see everything” (Martin Amis), and Bellow’s extraordinary valedictory, Ravelstein (2000), about a professor of political philosophy made suddenly famous by an unlikely bestseller. Brimming with Bellow’s characteristic wit and ebullience, but imbued with the awareness of approaching death, Bellow’s final book is an unforgettable meditation on love and friendship, eros and mortality.