never spoke publicly of his sexual orientation, he was openly gay, and his close friends, colleagues, and former students all knew of it. He was a bachelor and never married or had children. In his most famous book, The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom criticized homosexual politics in American universities on an issue relating to his core concern, liberal arts education, or the "Great Books" liberal arts curriculum, making a distinction between a politically self-defined group of homosexual activists and homosexuality per se. Although Bloom, in the wake of his literary stardom, explicitly stated, at a Harvard University gathering (published in Giants and Dwarfs), that he was not a conservative, he was much admired by writers in conservative publications such as William F. Buckley, Jr's National Review. Arguing in support of Bloom in The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan wrote: "Bloom was gay, and he died of AIDS. The salience of these facts is strengthened, not weakened, by Bloom's public silence about them. Of all people, he knew the centrality of the things about which we remain silent. ... Retaining the purity of that longing was his life's work. The reason he disliked the modern cult of easy sex was not because he scorned or feared the erotic life, but because he revered it. He saw sexual longing as supremely expressed in individual love, and he wanted his students to experience both to the fullest. He not merely understood Nietzsche; he imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love. ... One day, one hopes, there will be a conservatism civilized enough to deserve him ..." The text Typical of Bellow's most accessible fiction, and resembling his short novel Seize the Day, Ravelstein mixes dialogue, narration, and unanswered questions. Abe Ravelstein is a paradox - the serious and mundane, the corporeal and spiritual, the conservative and radical. The one constant is the kindly friendship between "Chick" and Ravelstein. Few intellectual or personal subjects are taboo. Chick makes it clear that Ravelstein thinks he is too old to become a philosopher. The story follows the physical decline of Ravelstein, a University of Chicago professor, and how his recent literary fame and financial success have changed his life. After Ravelstein's death, the remainder of the work deals with the narrator's own illness and hospitalization. Ravelstein is not aloof or uninterested in everyday life. He is a consumer