Saul Bellow

Born Solomon Bellows on June 10, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian Jewish immigrants who had arrived from Saint Petersburg two years earlier, Saul Bellow grew up speaking Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and French. When he was nine, his family moved to Chicago, the city that would become the landscape of his imagination. He studied at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, where he earned a degree in sociology and anthropology. His early novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), were tightly controlled and Flaubertian, but The Adventures of Augie March (1953) broke open his style into a loose, exuberant, distinctly American voice. "I am an American, Chicago born," it famously begins, and the sentence announced a new kind of literary energy. He won the National Book Award three times, for Augie March, Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), a feat unmatched by any other writer. Humboldt's Gift (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He taught at the University of Chicago for decades, and his fierce, philosophical intelligence made him the dominant American novelist of the postwar era, though his personal life, five marriages, bitter feuds with former friends, was as turbulent as his fiction. He died on April 5, 2005, in Brookline, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-nine.