A Commonplace Book

In 1987, The Philosopher Robert Paul Wolff reviewed Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in the pages of Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. In his review, Wolff articulated a radical thesis: Allan Bloom did not exist. The Closing of the American Mind, he argued, was in fact a novel written by Saul Bellow, whose warm introduction had helped put Bloom before the public eye. "What Bellow has done, quite simply," Wolff explained, "is to write an entire coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades. The 'author' of this tirade, one of Bellow's most fully realized literary creations, is a mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name, 'Bloom.'"