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Saul Bellow
1915–2005 · 90 years Specialist
A Quebec-born immigrant's son who narrated the modern American mind
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on June 10, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, the youngest of four children of Abraham and Liza Bellow, Russian-Jewish immigrants who had fled Saint Petersburg. His father ran a bootlegging operation during Quebec's Prohibition-era liquor trade, and after he was beaten by associates, the family moved to Chicago in 1924, when Saul was nine. He grew up trilingual, Yiddish at home, English on the street, Hebrew at the synagogue school his mother pushed him toward, hoping for a rabbi or a violinist. She died when he was 17. He studied anthropology and sociology at Northwestern, graduating with honors in 1937, having steered clear of the English department over what he took to be its antisemitism.
Bellow published nine major novels across five decades, moving from the tight, claustrophobic Dangling Man (1944) to the sprawling, appetite-driven Adventures of Augie March (1953), whose opening line, 'I am an American, Chicago born,' announced a new kind of voice in American fiction. Herzog (1964) and Humboldt's Gift (1975) followed, along with a National Book Award three times over, a record no other novelist holds. In 1976 he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in the same year, cited for the humane understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture fused throughout his work. He taught at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought for more than three decades, producing students as steadily as he produced pages.
The domestic record undercuts the humane reputation. Bellow married five times and divorced four; Herzog, the novel that made him famous, grew directly out of the collapse of his second marriage, and he later described at least one of the divorces as a financial siege he barely survived. In the 1980s a remark attributed to him, 'Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?', made in defense of a Western-canon reading list, followed him for the rest of his career. He called it off the cuff and pedantic, not racist, and declined to apologize further; Chicago aldermen later blocked a proposal to name a Hyde Park street after him, citing that remark specifically.
Bellow died April 5, 2005, in Brookline, Massachusetts, at 89, with his fifth wife, Janis Freedman, and the daughter they had had together six years earlier. Philip Roth called him, alongside William Faulkner, one of the two writers who supplied the backbone of 20th-century American fiction; Martin Amis went further and called him simply the greatest American author. Chicago never got its Hyde Park street, but it named one for him in Humboldt Park instead. His papers, more than a hundred boxes of them, sit at the University of Chicago library, the institution where he taught longer than he had lived anywhere as a child.
Lifespan
Saul Bellow's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
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Dangling Man
book
His debut novel 1944 -
The Adventures of Augie March
book
National Book Award; opens 'I am an American, Chicago born' 1953 -
Herzog
book
National Book Award; grew out of his second divorce 1964 - Mr. Sammler's Planet book 1970
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Humboldt's Gift
book
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1976 1975
Life in brief
with age at each point- June 10, 1915 aged 0 Born in Lachine, Quebec
- 1924 aged ~9 Family moves to Chicago after his father is beaten
- 1937 aged ~22 Graduates Northwestern University with honors
- 1944 aged ~29 Publishes his debut novel, Dangling Man
- 1953 aged ~38 The Adventures of Augie March wins the National Book Award
- 1964 aged ~49 Herzog becomes a best-seller
- 1976 aged ~61 Wins the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1990 aged ~75 Receives the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution
- April 5, 2005 aged 89 Dies in Brookline, Massachusetts
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