Bézout rings with almost stable range 1

Elementary divisor domains were defined by Kaplansky [I. Kaplansky, Elementary divisors and modules, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 66 (1949) 464–491] and generalized to rings with zero-divisors by Gillman and Henriksen [L. Gillman, M. Henriksen, Some remarks about elementary divisor rings, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 82 (1956) 362–365]. In [M.D. Larsen, W.J. Lewis, T.S. Shores, Elementary divisor rings and finitely presented modules, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 187 (1) (1974) 231–248], it was also proved that if a Hermite ring satisfies (N), then it is an elementary divisor ring. The aim of this article is to generalize this result (as well as others) to a much wider class of rings. Our main result is that Bézout rings whose proper homomorphic images all have stable range 1 (in particular, neat rings) are elementary divisor rings.