Saul Bellow

Who Was Saul Bellow?

Saul Bellow was the dominant American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century — a writer whose work set the terms for what serious American fiction could do and be across five decades. Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian Jewish immigrants, raised in Montreal and then Chicago, he absorbed from his earliest years the collision between Old World Jewish culture and the brash, energetic vulgarity of American life. That collision became the engine of his fiction.

His major novels — The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) — constitute one of the most sustained and intellectually serious bodies of work in American literature. Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, the Pulitzer Prize, and three National Book Awards. He was, by any measure, the most honored American writer of his generation.

Bellow’s central preoccupation was the fate of the soul in modern secular culture — the question of whether a human being can maintain genuine interiority, genuine moral seriousness, genuine contact with the transcendent, in a civilization organized around distraction, consumption, and the therapeutic management of the self. His novels answer this question with varying degrees of hope, but they never stop asking it.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Adventures of Augie March — 1953 — National Book Award
• Herzog — 1964 — National Book Award
• Mr. Sammler's Planet — 1970 — National Book Award
• Humboldt's Gift — 1975 — Pulitzer Prize
• Henderson the Rain King — 1959