Saul Bellow

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop talking about the family dacha and the servants in Russia. His father moved from onion importer to bakery worker to bootlegger, a man falling in ways he could never quite name. That sense of falling, of a prosperous world suddenly gone, is where Bellow's fiction begins.

  He grew up to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Book Award for Fiction three times. No other writer has won that last award three times. Philip Roth, his friend and protege, would later say that Bellow and William Faulkner provided "the backbone of 20th-century American literature" and that together they were "the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."

  How did a child of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, raised in a high-crime neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, become the writer that James Wood said he judged all modern prose by? And what drove Bellow's characters, across novel after novel, to wrestle with what he called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century"? Those are the questions that open this story.

• 2. A Childhood Built on Loss

  ›

  Lachine, Quebec, in 1915 was a long way from Saint Petersburg. Bellow's parents, Lescha and Abraham, had arrived from Russia in 1913, and the gap between what they had left and what they found shaped everything that followed. Bellow later wrote that his mother never stopped talking about the family dacha, the privileged life that was now gone. She was working in the kitchen. Cooking, washing, mending. There had been servants in Russia. But, as he observed, you could always "transpose from your humiliating condition with the help of a sort of embittered irony."

  At age eight, a serious respiratory infection gave young Bellow something unexpected: time to read. It was during that illness, reportedly, that he first encountered Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and decided he would be a writer. His mother, deeply religious, wanted him to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. She died when he was 17, before she could see which path he chose.

  When Bellow was nine, Abraham moved the family to the Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Chicago would become the backdrop of many of Bellow's novels. Bellow's love of the Torah had begun at age four, when he learned Hebrew. He also grew up reading Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century. At Tuley High School on Chicago's west side, he befriended Isaac Rosenfeld, a friendship that lasted long enough for Rosenfeld to appear, decades later, as the model for King Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King.

• 3. Education and Unlikely Turns

  ›

  Northwestern University awarded Bellow a degree with honors in anthropology and sociology, not the literature degree he had originally sought. He had transferred there from the University of Chicago after concluding that its English department was anti-Jewish. The detour into anthropology was not wasted. Critics and scholars have long noted that anthropological references surface throughout his fiction, and the influence of that training on his literary style has been widely remarked upon.

  In the 1930s, Bellow joined the Chicago branch of the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program that included Richard Wright and Nelson Algren among its members. Many of the writers were politically radical. Bellow was a Trotskyist in a group where Stalinist-leaning writers were the majority, and he had to absorb their taunts. That experience of being the dissenter in a politically committed crowd left marks on his thinking that lasted decades.

  In 1941, he became a naturalized United States citizen, having discovered, only when he tried to enlist in the armed forces, that he had immigrated to the United States illegally as a child. During World War II he joined the merchant marine, and during that service he completed his first novel, Dangling Man, published in 1944. It follows a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war, a portrait drawn from Bellow's own particular form of suspended existence.

• 4. The Making of Augie March

  ›

  A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 sent Bellow to Paris, where he began writing the novel that would establish his name. The Adventures of Augie March appeared in 1953, and critics immediately reached for the highest comparisons. They noted the resemblance between the picaresque structure of the book and the great 17th-century Spanish classic Don Quixote. The novel follows its title character through a series of careers and encounters, written in what reviewers recognized as a colloquial yet philosophical style.

  The book's opening paragraph became one of the most famous in American literature. That one paragraph announced something new: a voice that could move between street slang and high philosophy without losing its footing. The Adventures of Augie March secured Bellow's standing as a major author. It also earned him the first of his three National Book Awards for Fiction in 1954.

  While in Paris, Bellow was also working as a translator. In 1953, he translated Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer from Yiddish into English, bringing Singer's work to a wide anglophone audience. John Podhoretz, paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom, once said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air." The Paris years gave that hunger room to expand.

• 5. Chicago, Herzog, and the Bestseller

  ›

  In 1962, Bellow returned to Chicago as a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The committee's approach was to have professors work closely with talented graduate students on a multi-disciplinary basis. He taught there alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom, for more than 30 years. He found Chicago vulgar but vital, more representative of America than New York. In a profile published in 1982, his neighborhood was described as a high-crime area, and Bellow maintained he had to live there and "stick to his guns."

  In 1964, Herzog landed on the bestseller list, surprising even Bellow himself. The novel centers on a middle-aged, troubled college professor who writes letters to friends, scholars, and the dead but never sends them. That such a cerebral book sold as widely as it did was something Bellow had not expected. It was followed in 1975 by Humboldt's Gift, in which Bellow drew on his late friend and rival, the self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, as the model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher. Anthroposophy, the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, appears as a theme in that book, a direct echo of Bellow's own participation in a Chicago study group years earlier.

  Humboldt's Gift won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976, the same year Bellow received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• 6. Stockholm and What Came After

  ›

  In Stockholm, Sweden, Bellow delivered a 70-minute address to the Nobel audience, calling on writers to serve as beacons for civilization and to awaken it from intellectual torpor. It was a statement of purpose as much as an acceptance speech. The following year, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the United States federal government awards for achievement in the humanities. Bellow titled it "The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over."

  He never stopped teaching. His roster of institutions included Yale University, the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Puerto Rico, Bard College, and Boston University. At Boston, he co-taught a class with the critic James Wood, though he modestly absented himself when it was time to discuss his own Seize the Day. In 1993, to take up the Boston appointment, Bellow moved from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts.

  One telling detail from those later decades: as a young man, Bellow had traveled to Mexico City specifically to meet the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was assassinated the day before they were to meet. Bellow also tagged along with Robert F. Kennedy for a magazine profile he never wrote, and counted the author Ralph Ellison and the poet John Berryman among his close friends. He died in Brookline on the 5th of April, 2005, at age 89, and is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim in Brattleboro, Vermont.

• 7. The Argument Over His Legacy

  ›

  Martin Amis called Bellow "the greatest American author ever, in my view," and said his sentences seemed to weigh more than anyone else's. James Wood, in his eulogy published in The New Republic, wrote that he had judged all modern prose by Bellow's, and that discovering the work in his late teens had the quality of a love affair about which one could not keep silent. John Cheever, in his journals, had already lamented that alongside Bellow's fiction his own stories seemed like "mere suburban splinters."

  Not everyone agreed. In a private letter, Vladimir Nabokov described Bellow as a "miserable mediocrity." In 1971, Kingsley Amis suggested that crime writer John D. MacDonald was by any standard a better writer. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum argued that Bellow too often strained to yoke together the street-wise Chicago wiseguy and undigested chunks of philosophic thought, and that only Ravelstein, published in 2000, fully rose above this tendency. Sam Tanenhaus, writing in 2007, catalogued the longueurs and digressions and the punitively caricatured ex-wives, and then quoted Randall Jarrell's description of Walt Whitman to answer his own objections: Bellow was "a world, a waste with, here and there, systems blazing at random out of the darkness."

  V. S. Pritchett landed on the other side of the argument. He called Bellow's novella Seize the Day a "small gray masterpiece." In 2024, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp featuring a portrait illustration of Bellow by Joe Ciardiello. His papers remain at the library of the University of Chicago, the institution he kept returning to across his entire career.