Bellow, Saul

(b. 10 June 1915 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; d. 5 April 2005 in Brookline, Massachusetts), Nobel Prize–winning author who was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish-American writers to come of age after World War II and whose short stories, novels, and essays reflect the Jewish-American immigrant experience and the high comedy of failed relationships in our modern age.

Bellow was born Solomon Bellow, the fourth and last child of Abraham Belo, an onion importer and part-time bootlegger, and Lescha (Gordin) Belo, called “Liza.” His parents had emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia, two years before his birth. (A customs official misspelled the name as “Bellow” on immigration documents.) Saint Dominique Street, the Jewish ghetto where they lived, was poverty stricken, rat ridden, and rich in immigrant tongues and experience. Because by the age of four Bellow had memorized long passages of the Hebrew Bible, his mother hoped that he would become a rabbi. During the 1918 influenza epidemic, as numerous funeral corteges passed by the house, Bellow became afraid of death, and his terror deepened after he was hospitalized for tuberculosis in 1923 and saw many children die. By 1924 the family had relocated to the multiracial tenements of Humboldt Park, Chicago—the immigrant neighborhood that shaped so much of Bellow’s fiction. Here was a rich linguistic environment, where immigrant English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and other European languages were spoken. That year, Bellow’s mother died at home, leaving him emotionally bereft and estranged from his father and brothers. Fear of death, distrust of women, and failed male friendships continued to mark his emotional life and all of his highly autobiographical fiction.

Bellow graduated from Tuley High School in 1933 and that fall entered the University of Chicago. By then, he was an avowed follower of the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and determined to become a writer. In 1935 he transferred to Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1937 with a BA and honors in sociology and anthropology. He went that year to New York City to meet other intellectuals and writers but returned after Christmas and married Anita Goshkin on 31 December. Three years later the Bellows traveled to Mexico together to meet the exiled Trotsky, only to find him assassinated and lying in state. The couple had one son but eventually divorced. The trip to Mexico inspired an early manuscript called “Acatla” (never published) as well as “Two Morning Monologues” (1941), “The Mexican General” (1942), and parts of The Adventures of Augie March, which was eventually published in 1953. At the start of World War II, Bellow was rejected from the U.S. Army because of a hernia. Instead, he joined the Merchant Marine in 1944 and was sent to the U.S. Maritime Service Training Station at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York. He was still in training when the war ended, and he left the service in 1945.

When Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, appeared in 1944, critics applauded its mastery and brilliance of thought. The novel features a highly autobiographical narcissistic protagonist whose principal domain is his own sensibility. Joseph quarrels with wife, friends, and relatives; lives off the earnings of his faithful wife, Eva; succumbs to fits of paranoia and anger; and engages in a desultory affair. He learns to hate the physical decay of his elderly neighbors and is haunted by the fear of death. Finally, he admits that the romantic retreat into his own psyche has been a failure. Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, published in 1947, explores the Jewish-American sense of victimization in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.

In 1948 Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing him to travel to Europe for two years. He worked more on his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, while living with the black writer Ralph Ellison in bomb-ravaged Paris. In this novel Bellow finally emerged from his mood of gloom to find his distinctly American voice, humor, place, and moment as a writer. Like his creator, Augie is a first-generation Jewish-American picaro journeying through Depression-era Chicago. The novel is a rich chronicle of Bellow’s own childhood and coming of age in the North Side immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago, and it won the National Book Award in 1954.

On his return from Europe, Bellow settled in New York City, teaching evening courses at New York University and working as a book reviewer while he wrote articles and fiction. In 1952 he received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and was made Creative Writing Fellow at Princeton University. In 1954 Bellow received a Ford Foundation grant and in 1956 published Seize the Day. The novel tells of the failed marriage and business dealings of Tommy Wilhelm, the classic schlemiel of Yiddish folklore, who, like his creator, must put up with his own father’s scorn and find his spiritual identity outside capitalist America.

On 1 February 1956, Bellow married Alexandra Tschacbasov, and the couple had one child, a son, before divorcing. By the end of the 1950s Bellow had endured several emotional blows, among them, the deaths of Isaac Rosenfeld, a longtime literary friend, and Ben Huebsch, his trusted Viking Press publisher. Delmore Schwartz, another longtime writer friend, had been remanded to Belle-vue Hospital in the course of a long mental decline. Not surprisingly, Bellow effected an escape of the soul to Africa in his next novel, Henderson the Rain King (1959). The violinist and pig farmer Eugene Henderson is a social outcast who is metaphysically earnest, bumbling, and despotic. With his initials “E.H.,” his drinking habit, his rifle and private firing range, his fascination with African safaris, and his participation in a foreign war, Henderson mocks Hemingway himself, a writer whose fame Bellow clearly coveted.

On 10 December 1961 Bellow married Susan Glass-man, and the couple subsequently had a son. That year he also received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Northwestern University and in 1962 joined the prestigious Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he stayed on the faculty until 1993. His next novel, Herzog, published in 1964, rivals James Joyce’s Ulysses and also critiques philosophical modernism. It reflects Bellow’s immersion in marital and financial troubles at that time by featuring a cuckolded divorcee and failed academic whose grand treatise on Romanticism will never be finished and who is close to collapse. Bellow’s profound shock at having discovered his wife Alexandra’s affair with their mutual friend Jack Ludwig had pushed him into deep depression. He transmutes the experience by producing an intensely humiliated, self-justifying, tearful hero precipitated into intellectual and spiritual crisis by the failure of his marriage. Throughout 1965 Bellow continued to garner honors for Herzog, including the National Book Award and the International Prize. In the mid-1960s, he made an important trip to Israel to report on the Six-Day War for Newsday, which cemented his view that the plight of the Jews was evocative of all human experience in the twentieth century. In 1968 Bellow’s first short-story collection, Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, appeared, and he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres and won an award from B’Nai Brith. Bellow and Glassman were divorced in 1968.

Another novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, came out in 1970. Set in New York City at the height of the 1960s student radical movement, it features a protagonist who is a classic Old World, Western civilization literary thinker and European aristocrat. A Holocaust survivor, Mr. Sammler has lost his wife to the Nazis and endured the horrors of World War II, leaving him emotionally scarred and alienated. An American relative makes it possible for him to immigrate to America, where Sammler eventually relearns the necessity of connecting with his loved ones and taking responsibility for them. Mr. Sammler’s Planet earned the National Book Award for fiction. In 1971 Bellow’s play The Last Analysis had a brief run at an off-Broadway theater. In October 1974 Bellow married Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca.

Bellow’s next novel, Humboldt’s Gift, was published in 1975. This portrayal of the way in which twentieth-century capitalist America has all but bankrupted Western humanism and depleted the inner life of the Anglo-American artist earned a Pulitzer Prize. Charlie Citrine, a Chicagoan with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, and well-endowed young women, has squandered his poetic gifts. Here Bellow also registers his interest in meditative states and transcendental experience through his reading of the anthroposophists Rudolph Steiner and Owen Bar-field. In 1976 he received the much-coveted Nobel Prize in Literature. That same year he published To Jersualem and Back: A Personal Account, which combines a journalistic chronology of his stay in Israel with firsthand accounts of many interviews, fictional stories, reported conversations, travelogues, and pieces of public addresses. Critics berated him as a neoconservative who failed to understand the history of Zionism, Israel, Islam, and world politics. In 1977 he was awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an award given in recognition of special achievement in the field of literature.

The Dean’s December (1982), a general indictment of American society, features yet another intellectual protagonist, Dean Albert Corde, dean of students at a college in Chicago. Moving through one month in Corde’s life—and traveling between Bucharest and Chicago—this “tale of two cities” counterpoises the problems of an oppressive Communist society with those of an equally but differently corrupt Western democratic one. Him with His Foot in His Mouth, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1984, followed by another novel, More Die of Heartbreak, in 1987. The latter book, a lament about failed men and absent mermaids, is full of comic characters, botched loves, and fatal forays into the danger zones of sex and romance. As such, it mirrors Bellow’s own disastrous experiences with women and marriage. Bellow and Tuleca were divorced in 1986.

In September of 1989 Bellow married Janis Freedman; the couple had one daughter. That year two of Bellow’s novellas, A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection, were published as paperbacks. A Theft illuminates the tragicomic failure of modern heterosexual relationships and features Bellow’s first female protagonist. The Bellarosa Connection has an unnamed elderly narrator who is trying desperately to recapture a lost relationship with an American Jewess and her husband, a Holocaust survivor. At the start of the novel, these two people are dead, and the narrator is overcome with grief over his loss and for his own general “amnesia” about the Holocaust. He is burdened by the knowledge that he has lived more through his memory than through actual relationships. In 1993, tired of passing houses once occupied by deceased friends, Bellow left Chicago and, the following year, took a position at Boston University.

Bellow’s collected essays, It All Adds Up, came out in 1994, and the novella The Actual appeared in 1997. In 2000 Bellow published his last book, Ravelstein, a tribute to his friendship with Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago. Posing as the great biographer James Boswell, the protagonist Chick (a thinly disguised persona for Bellow) is writing a Johnsonian tribute to his late friend, Ravelstein. In this chronicle of the special brotherhood of two famous Jewish-American intellectuals, Bellow finally accepts what it means to be the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in America and captures the origins of his own Jewish voice, Jewish humor, Jewish anxiety, and Jewish spiritual life in twentieth-century America.

Bellow died of pneumonia on 5 April 2005 and was buried in the Brattleboro Area Jewish Community Morningside Cemetery, in Brattleboro, Vermont. Bellow’s status in the annals of American literature after World War II compares with that of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. One of the most written-about fiction writers of the twentieth-century, he exhaustively analyzed the effects of American cultural anxiety in the age of technology, rationalism, existentialism, and modernism; defended the embattled soul; and affirmed Judeo-Christian humanism.

A collection of Bellow’s personal papers is held by the University of Chicago. For information on the life and work of Bellow, see Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (1991); and James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (2000). For a set of interviews, see Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, Conversations with Saul Bellow. For tributes to Bellow, see “Saul Bellow at Eighty,” Salmagundi 106–07 (Spring/Summer 1995): 31–108. Obituaries are in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian (all 6 Apr. 2005).

Gloria L. Cronin