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| Name | Saul Bellow |
|---|---|
| Caption | Saul Bellow at the Miami Book Fair International of 1990 |
| Birthname | Solomon Bellow |
| Birthdate | June 10, 1915 |
| Birthplace | Lachine, Quebec, Canada |
| Alma mater | University of ChicagoNorthwestern UniversityUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Deathdate | April 05, 2005 |
| Deathplace | Brookline, Massachusetts, United States |
| Nationality | Canadian/American |
| Ethnicity | Jewish |
| Awards | |
| Influences | The Bible, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Rudolf Steiner |
| Influenced | Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Julian Barnes, John Berryman |
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times, and the only writer to have been nominated for it six times.
In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, "Henderson the Rain King," Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."
A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, the city that was to form the backdrop of many of his novels.
Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom (see Ravelstein), John Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air."
In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration Writer's Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. Most of the writers were radical: if they were not card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause. Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning writers he had to suffer their taunts.
In 1941 Bellow became a naturalized US citizen. In 1943, Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.
During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.
From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, living on Commonwealth Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writing The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Critics have remarked on the resemblance between Bellow's picaresque novel and the great 17th Century Spanish classic Don Quixote. The book starts with one of American literature's most famous opening paragraphs, and it follows its titular character through a series of careers and encounters, as he lives by his wits and his resolve. Written in a colloquial yet philosophical style, The Adventures of Augie March established Bellow's reputation as a major author.
There were also other reasons for Bellow's return to Chicago, where he moved into the Hyde Park neighborhood with his third wife, Susan Glassman. Bellow found Chicago to be vulgar but vital, and more representative of America than New York. He was able to stay in contact with old high school friends and a broad cross-section of society. In a 1982 profile, Bellow's neighborhood was described as a high-crime area in the city's center, and Bellow maintained he had to live in such a place as a writer and "stick to his guns."
Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novel Herzog. Bellow was surprised at the commercial success of this cerebral novel about a middle-aged and troubled college professor who writes letters to friends, scholars and the dead, but never sends them. Bellow returned to his exploration of mental instability, and its relationship to genius, in his 1975 novel Humboldt's Gift. Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, as his model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969.
Bellow traveled widely throughout his life, mainly to Europe, which he sometimes visited twice a year. He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists – William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in The New Republic, wrote:
Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a "Jewish writer." Bellow's work also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.
Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust and Henry James, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes.
For Linda Grant, "what Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive."
On the other hand, Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the 19th century European novel. In a private letter, Vladimir Nabokov once referred to Bellow as a "miserable mediocrity." Journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum described Bellow's Ravelstein (2000) as the only book that rose above Bellow's failings as an author. Rosenbaum wrote,
Sam Tanenhaus wrote in New York Times Book Review in 2007:
But, Tanenhaus went on to answer his question:
V. S. Pritchett praised Bellow, finding his shorter works to be his best. Pritchett called Bellow's novella Seize the Day a "small gray masterpiece."
As he grew older, Bellow moved decidedly away from leftist politics and became identified with cultural conservatism. and postmodernism. In 1995 along with Lynne V. Cheney and other noted conservatives, he helped found the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) based in Washington, D.C. and funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation and John M. Olin Foundation Promoting the Core Curriculum view of liberal education, the ACTA is best known for its 2001 report, Defending Civilization . . . , which met with wide criticism and accusations of neo-McCarthyism, because it served as a broadside against a "liberal academia" that the report authors saw as being insufficiently patriotic and "soft" on international terrorism. Following a barrage of criticism, ACTA published a "revised and expanded" version.
Bellow also thrust himself into the often contentious realm of Jewish and African-American relations. In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow's portrayal of a black pickpocket who exposes himself in public was criticized, by some activists, as racist. In 2007, attempts to name a street after Bellow in his Hyde Park neighborhood were scotched by local alderman on the grounds that Bellow had made remarks about the neighborhood's current inhabitants that they considered racist.
In an interview in the March 7, 1988 New Yorker, Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." The taunt was seen by some as a slight against non-Western literature. Bellow at first claimed to have been misquoted. Later, writing in his defense in the New York Times, he said, "The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin... Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see." Bellow claimed to have remembered shortly after making his infamous comment that he had in fact read a Zulu novel in translation: Chaka by Thomas Mofolo (an inaccuracy remains in this: Mofolo's novel is in Sesotho, not Zulu).
Despite his identification with Chicago, he kept aloof from some of that city's more conventional writers. Studs Terkel in a 2006 interview with Stop Smiling magazine said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend'. But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love Seize the Day."
"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."
Category:1915 births Category:2005 deaths Category:American Nobel laureates Category:American people of Canadian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:American short story writers Category:American socialists Category:American Trotskyists Category:Anthroposophists Category:Bard College faculty Category:Canadian immigrants to the United States Category:Canadian Jews Category:Canadian Nobel laureates Category:Canadian novelists Category:Canadian people of Russian descent Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Jewish American novelists Category:National Book Award winners Category:New York University faculty Category:Nobel laureates in Literature Category:Northwestern University alumni Category:O. Henry Award winners Category:People from Brookline, Massachusetts Category:People from Montreal Category:People of the New Deal arts projects Category:Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:University of Chicago faculty Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni Category:Works Progress Administration workers Category:Writers from Chicago, Illinois Category:Postmodern writers
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