Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer who is considered one of the greatest authors of the 20th century.
Much of his work was closely associated with his hometown of Chicago, which served as the setting for many of his novels. During his career, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and, on three occasions, the National Book Award.
Born Solomon Bellow in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, he was the son of Russian emigres to Canada. The family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago when Bellow was 9-years-old.
Bellow grew up in a childhood steeped in Jewish tradition. His mother wanted him to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. But, Bellow eventually rebelled against what he described to The New York Times as “suffocating orthodoxy.”
He attended the University of Chicago but two years later transferred to Northwestern University because it was cheaper. He wanted to study literature at Northwestern but, according to the Times, he decided against it because of what he saw as the “tweedy anti-Semitism” of the English Department. He graduated in 1937 with honors in sociology and anthropology. He later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He left his graduate studies after a couple of months and eventually went to work for the Encyclopedia Britannica, where, according to the Times, he worked on Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books” series.
He became a U.S. citizen in 1941. When World War II began, he joined the merchant marines after being rejected by the U.S. Army because of a hernia. During his time in the service, he finished his debut novel, Dangling Man, which was published in 1944.
Following the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, Bellow moved to Paris where he began writing his breakout novel, The Adventures of Augie March.
With the publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953 and then Henderson The Rain King in 1959, Bellow’s reputation as a major literary figure was firmly established.
Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The Royal Swedish Academy cited his “exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion.”
According to his obituary in the Times, Bellow was often lumped together with Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud as a Jewish American writer but he rejected the label, saying he didn’t want to be part of the “Hart, Schaffner & Marx” of American letters.
He moved from Chicago to Brookline, Mass., in 1993 in order to teach at Boston University. He died at his home in Brookline on April 5, 2005 at the age of 89.
Bellow is buried in the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Bibliography
- Dangling Man (1944)
- The Victim (1947)
- The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
- Seize the Day (1956)
- Henderson the Rain King (1959)
- Herzog (1964)
- Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970)
- Humboldt’s Gift (1975), won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize
- The Dean’s December (1982)
- More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
- A Theft (1989)
- The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
- The Actual (1997)
- Ravelstein (2000)
- To Jerusalem and Back (1976) – Memoir
- It All Adds Up (1994) – Essay collection
Articles about Saul Bellow:
November 21, 2007
Saul Bellow’s thoughts on God
The Forward‘s Web site has an interesting excerpt from a new book called, “Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion,” by cultural critic Antonio Monda. Monda is a Catholic and he teaches film at NYU. According to the blurb … Continue reading
November 14, 2007
Christopher Hitchens on Saul Bellow
Christopher Hitchens recently spoke about Saul Bellow at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington D.C. As you’ll see in the video below, Hitchens reads aloud a disturbingly graphic passage from Bellow’s 1970 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Yes, it’s the … Continue reading
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