Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was a novelist born in Canada who spent most of his life in the United States and became one of the central voices of twentieth-century American fiction. Born Solomon Bellows to a Lithuanian-Jewish family, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, the same year he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Humboldt's Gift. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he is widely regarded as one of the leading Jewish-American writers of the second half of the century.

He was born on June 10, 1915, in Lachine, near Montreal, two years after his parents left Saint Petersburg. When he was nine, the family settled on Chicago's West Side, a city that would become the setting for many of his books. His mother, who was devoutly religious, hoped he would become a rabbi or a concert violinist, but he rebelled against the strict religious upbringing and began writing early. He studied at the University of Chicago and then at Northwestern, where he graduated in anthropology and sociology after deciding that the English department was hostile to Jews. He later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. His anthropological training shaped a prose full of cultural references.

His first novel, Dangling Man (1944), written while he served in the merchant marine, follows a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted. After a Guggenheim Fellowship he moved to Paris, where he began The Adventures of Augie March (1953), a picaresque novel in a colloquial yet philosophical voice that established his reputation. Critics have compared it with Don Quixote. His later books, including Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), explore modern alienation, inner life and the search for meaning, with sharp humor and a strong current of ideas. Herzog brought him unexpected commercial success and reached the bestseller lists.

In 1962 he returned to Chicago to teach on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he remained for more than thirty years alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom. Humboldt's Gift (1975), partly modeled on the poet Delmore Schwartz, won him the Pulitzer and, a year later, the Nobel. In his address in Stockholm he urged writers to be beacons for civilization and to rouse it from intellectual torpor. He later gave the Jefferson Lecture and was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

His later work includes The Dean's December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak (1987) and Ravelstein (2000), a portrait of Allan Bloom. His legacy lies in the way he fused comedy, philosophical reflection and the drama of urban life, and in how he made Jewish tradition, European culture and the experience of immigration central to the American novel. He died in Brookline in 2005, aged 89.