Bellow, Saul

Bellow, Saul (1915–2005), born in Canada of parents recently emigrated from Russia, was reared in Chicago and educated at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern (B.S., 1937). He has taught at Minnesota, Princeton, New York University, and elsewhere, but his career is that of a writer. His first two novels, presenting a Kafka‐like atmosphere, are Dangling Man (1944), a psychological study of a man waiting to be inducted into the army and living in limbo between civilian and military life, and The Victim (1947), about the agonizing, equivocal relations of Jew and Gentile. His next novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), which won a National Book Award, is naturalistic in treating the picaresque adventures of a young Chicago Jew. Seize the Day (1956) includes a novella, stories, and a one‐act play. Henderson the Rain King (1959) opens with a realistic depiction of an intense middle‐age Connecticut millionaire whose inner urge for fulfillment of self—“I want, I want”—drives him to primitive Africa, where in a symbolic tragi‐comedy he encounters fantastic experiences. Herzog (1964) is an intense revelation of the life and experiences of a middle‐aged Jewish intellectual, presenting his involvements with two wives and other women, with his children, with a friend who betrays him, and with his careers of teaching and writing. He is led through neurosis almost to suicide and emerges “pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed.” Mr. Sammler's Planet (1969) is a fictive critique of modern society as seen by a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp resident in New York. Humboldt's Gift (1975, Pulitzer Prize) depicts a crisis in the life of the narrator that is resolved by his friend, the poet Humboldt. Bellow did not publish another novel until The Dean's December, issued seven years later, whose protagonist is in part an autobiographical figure, concerned with two opposing concepts of life and thought. More Die of Heartbreak (1987) treats in unnamed Chicago a distinguished professor of botany wed to a handsome wealthy woman who is sadly and humorously involved in a family feud and sexual confusion. The novel gives a sense of people, many ignorant and corrupt, in contemporary American society. In his later years, Bellow has written-a number of novellas, including Theft (1988), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), and The Actual (1997). It All Adds Up (1994) prints essays and memoirs, most previously published in periodicals, dating back in some instances 30 years. Mosby's Memoirs (1968) collects stories, The Last Analysis (1964) is a comic play, and To Jerusalem and Back (1976) deals with his visit to Israel. In 1976 he was awarded a Nobel Prize.