Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Saint Petersburg two years earlier. When he was nine the family moved to Chicago, the city that would become the ground of his fiction. He studied at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, where he took his degree in anthropology and sociology, and began publishing in the early 1940s; his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), is the journal of a young man waiting to be drafted.

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) broke with the tight, Flaubertian manner of his first books for a loose, exuberant first-person voice that took in the streets of Depression Chicago and much of the world beyond. It won the National Book Award, as did Herzog (1964), whose hero, a professor in crisis, composes unsent letters to the living and the dead, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). Bellow’s central figures are thinking men, often comic and often overwhelmed, trying to keep hold of the soul amid noise, money and modern ideas; few novelists have made intellectual life so physically vivid.

Humboldt’s Gift (1975), drawn in part from his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize followed in 1976. For decades he taught at the University of Chicago, notably on its Committee on Social Thought, before moving to Boston University in 1993. He continued to publish into his eighties, completing Ravelstein in 2000, and died in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2005.