Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow, (b. June 10, 1915, Lachine,
near Montreal, Quebec, Canada—d. April
5, 2005, Brookline, Massachusetts,
U.S.), American novelist whose
characterizations of modern urban man,
disaffected by society but not destroyed
in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1976. Brought up in a
Jewish household and fluent in
Yiddish—which influenced his energetic
English style—he was representative of
the Jewish American writers whose works
became central to American literature
after World War II.
Bellow’s parents emigrated in 1913 from
Russia to Montreal. When he was nine
they moved to Chicago. He attended the
University of Chicago and Northwestern
University (B.S., 1937) and afterward
combined writing with a teaching career
at various universities, including the
University of Minnesota, Princeton
University, New York University, Bard
College, the University of Chicago, and
Boston University.
Bellow won a reputation among a small
group of readers with his first two
novels, Dangling Man (1944), a story in
diary form of a man waiting to be
inducted into the army, and The Victim
(1947), a subtle study of the
relationship between a Jew and a
Gentile, each of whom becomes the
other’s victim. The Adventures of Augie
March (1953) brought wider acclaim and
won the National Book Award (1954). It
is a picaresque story of a poor Jewish
youth from Chicago, his
progress—sometimes highly comic—through
the world of the 20th century, and his
attempts to make sense of it. In this
novel Bellow employed for the first time
a loose, breezy style in conscious
revolt against the preoccupation of
writers of that time with perfection of
form.
Henderson the Rain King (1959) continued
the picaresque approach in its tale of
an eccentric American millionaire on a
quest in Africa. Seize the Day (1956), a
novella, is a unique treatment of a
failure in a society where the only
success is success. He also wrote a
volume of short stories, Mosby’s Memoirs
(1968), and To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
about a trip to Israel.
In his later novels and novellas—Herzog
(1964; National Book Award, 1965), Mr.
Sammler’s Planet (1970; National Book
Award, 1971), Humboldt’s Gift (1975;
Pulitzer Prize, 1976), The Dean’s
December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak
(1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa
Connection (1989), and The Actual
(1997)—Bellow arrived at his most
characteristic vein. The heroes of these
works are often Jewish intellectuals
whose interior monologues range from the
sublime to the absurd. At the same time,
their surrounding world, peopled by
energetic and incorrigible realists,
acts as a corrective to their
intellectual speculations. It is this
combination of cultural sophistication
and the wisdom of the streets that
constitutes Bellow’s greatest
originality. In Ravelstein (2000) he
presented a fictional version of the
life of teacher and philosopher Allan
Bloom.
