Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow, born Solomon Bellows on June 10, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, was a Canadian-American writer whose work helped define serious American fiction in the twentieth century. His parents, Lescha and Abraham Bellows, had emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia, two years before his birth, and the family was Lithuanian-Jewish. When Bellow was nine, they moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, a city that later formed the backdrop of many of his novels.

Bellow became one of the most honored writers of his time. He received the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He was also the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and in 1990 he received the National Book Foundation’s lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His best-known books include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein.

The sources of Bellow’s fiction were close to home. His parents carried memories of a lost life in Russia, and Bellow later wrote of their sense of having “fallen” from earlier comfort into hard work and disappointment. His father worked as an onion importer, in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger. His mother, Liza, was deeply religious and wanted Saul to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. He resisted what he later called the “suffocating orthodoxy” of his upbringing, but his early love of Hebrew and the Torah remained part of him.

Reading came early and intensely. At age eight, a respiratory infection kept him ill for a time, taught him self-reliance, and gave him more room to read. He reportedly decided to become a writer after reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He also grew up reading Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. At Tuley High School in Chicago, he befriended Yetta Barsh and Isaac Rosenfeld; in Henderson the Rain King, the character King Dahfu was modeled on Rosenfeld.

Bellow attended the University of Chicago and then Northwestern University, where he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology after deciding not to study literature in an English department he felt was anti-Jewish. He later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1930s he was part of the Chicago branch of the Federal Writers’ Project, among writers such as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, and he was a Trotskyist among many writers sympathetic to communism. During World War II, he joined the merchant marine and completed his first novel, Dangling Man, published in 1944.

In 1948, a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Bellow to move to Paris, where he began writing The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953. Its colloquial yet philosophical style established his reputation as a major author. The Swedish Nobel Committee later described his work as a mix of rich picaresque fiction, cultural analysis, adventure, tragedy, and philosophical conversation, guided by a witty, searching commentator. Bellow’s characters struggle with the outer and inner pressures that make people act, or keep them from acting. That tension is why his sentences still feel alive: they are alert to intellect, appetite, comedy, and the hard business of being human.