Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (born June 10, 1915, Lachine, near Montreal, Quebec, Canada—died April 5, 2005, Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.) was an American novelist whose characterizations of the modern urban man, disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The Nobel Committee cited Bellow’s writing “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” 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.

Early life and education

Bellow’s parents, Abram and Lescha (née Goldin) Belo, emigrated with their three children in 1913 from Russia to Montreal. There they changed their surname to Bellows and welcomed their fourth child, Solomon. When Solomon was nine they moved to Chicago, where the family name was changed again, to Bellow.

Bellow attended the University of Chicago but soon transferred to Northwestern University because of financial difficulties. While writing for the university’s newspaper, he began using the name Saul Bellow. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1937. He briefly attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin but did not complete a degree. “Every time I worked on my thesis,” Bellow told The Chicago Tribune in 1979, “it turned out to be a story. I disappeared for the Christmas holidays, and I never came back.” He returned to Chicago and began writing for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project. Afterward Bellow 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.

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Novels and other books

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 a 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.

Five years after Bellow’s death, more than 700 of his letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor, were published in Saul Bellow: Letters (2010).

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Personal life and additional honors

Bellow married Anita Goshkin, a social worker, in 1937. They divorced in 1955, and the following year he married Alexandra Tschacbasov, with whom he had a son, Adam, before their marriage ended in 1960. The next year he married Susan Glassman, a teacher with whom he had a second son, Daniel. Glassman and Bellow divorced in 1968. Bellow married a fourth time in 1974, to mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. They divorced in 1985, and four years later he married Janis Freedman, a professor with whom he had a daughter, Naomi Rose.

Bellow was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 and 1955. His other honors include a Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1977), the Emerson-Thoreau Medal (a lifetime achievement award) from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1977), and the National Medal of Arts (1988).