Last reviewed: June 2017
Author
June 10, 1915
Lachine, Quebec, Canada
April 5, 2005
Brookline, Massachusetts
Saul Bellow (BEH-loh), one of America’s greatest novelists since World War II, was the youngest of four children of Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family moved to Chicago when Bellow was nine, and he attended public schools before going to the University of Chicago on a scholarship; he graduated from Northwestern University in 1937. Although his father wanted him to be a doctor and his mother wished for him a career as a Talmudic scholar, Bellow pursued his studies in anthropology and sociology.
By the late 1930s, Bellow was married, and he had begun to read contemporary fiction and, in a back bedroom of his Chicago apartment, to write. He became employed with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a biographer of midwestern writers, and during World War II he served in the merchant marine, completing his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. After the war, he taught English at the University of Minnesota until he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, which afforded him an opportunity to live in Paris and travel in Europe. Returning to America in 1950, he spent the next ten years in New York City, the setting for Seize the Day. He returned to Chicago, where he became associated with the University of Chicago in 1962. In 1993, he moved to Boston, where he became a professor of literature at Boston University. Among his many awards are the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and, in 1976, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford in 1990's, at Boston University.
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Although some critics consider Dangling Man and The Victim apprentice works, there is no question that they bear Bellow’s distinguishing characteristics as a novelist: accurately realized scenes of urban and domestic lifestyles and of the hero who feels alienated from his environment because of his moral insight. Bellow came to be recognized as a major talent with the publication of The Adventures of Augie March. A massive, sprawling novel in picaresque form, the book records in a euphorically dazzling style reminiscent of the optimistic affirmations of Walt Whitman the coming-of-age of its idealistic title character. The host of subsidiary personalities gives the work a special exuberance. The portrayal of the Einhorn family, for example, has a Dickensian zest that places the book in the tradition of the nineteenth-century European novel. Seize the Day, more economical than its predecessor, presents a more somber and confused hero in Tommy Wilhelm, who tries to maintain his dignity amid the crises of a failing marriage and career and the embittered disappointment of a domineering, unloving father. In Henderson the Rain King, a comic fantasy about a man who flees to Africa to find himself, Bellow creates a farcical world in which he satirizes the very idealism some of his earlier characters had upheld. The novel bursts with exuberance and includes an opulent range of characters, including King Dahfu, who has read philosophy and who dreams of being reincarnated, after death, in the form of a lion.
With Herzog, Bellow produced what many consider his finest novel. Moses Herzog, the sensitive intellectual and student of Romanticism who writes letters to the world at large in an effort to keep his sanity and to understand his place as a moral sufferer in a world devoid of compassion, is a composite of all the heroes in Bellow’s fiction. He is a man with a conscience and a deep sense of his dignity, who is in conflict with a society that has become indifferent to human needs. The central dilemma for Herzog, as for all Bellow’s heroes, is how to maintain self-respect and a system of values in the midst of the self-effacement imposed by the social structure of postwar America. Bellow here assumes a traditional position as a novelist. He is more concerned with the basic, unchanging values of humankind than with the psychic disorders peculiar to the modern individual who is reflected in much twentieth-century fiction. As a novelist, Bellow looked back on such “moralistic” classics of world literature as the works of Fyodor Dostoevski rather than toward the aesthetically experimental psychological novels of his own time.
After the appearance of Herzog, Bellow’s reputation continued to grow as he published novels, essays, and short stories at regular intervals. His work attracted both attention and controversy. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, The Dean’s December, and More Die of Heartbreak dealt in part with sensitive political and social issues and offended some critics. Ravelstein was a roman à clef about the dying of his friend Allan Bloom, the controversial author of the best seller The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Yet for all his interest in social and political problems, Bellow must be seen as essentially a spiritual and philosophical writer whose primary preoccupation throughout his career was the exploration of the souls of human beings in crisis. Bellow was a writer who consistently grew with each new work. His place in American letters as a major novelist is assured.
After suffering from an illness, Bellow died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on April 5, 2005, at the age of eighty-nine.