Saul Bellow taught at the University of Chicago for 30 years

Person: Saul Bellow
Lived: 1915–2005
Field: Literature
From: Canadian-American

The story

Saul Bellow was not only a novelist but a devoted teacher. Over his career he taught at Bard College, the University of Minnesota, Princeton, New York University, Yale, the University of Puerto Rico and Boston University, among others. In Puerto Rico in 1961 one of his creative writing students was William Kennedy, whom Bellow encouraged to write fiction.

In 1962 Bellow returned to Chicago, the city where he had grown up, to become a professor on the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. The committee, founded in 1941 by the economic historian John U. Nef with Frank Knight, Robert Redfield and the university's president Robert Maynard Hutchins, was built around the idea that professors should work closely with talented graduate students across disciplines, studying the permanent questions behind all learning. Its members over the years have included Hannah Arendt, T. S. Eliot, Mircea Eliade, Friedrich Hayek and J. M. Coetzee.

Bellow taught on the committee for more than 30 years, alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom, whom he later portrayed in his final novel, Ravelstein. He enjoyed the human contact and exchange of ideas that teaching brought, and he kept at it well into old age. Among his students was the poet Tom Mandel.

His Chicago years overlapped with his greatest successes. He settled in the Hyde Park neighbourhood near the university, and there he wrote Herzog, which reached the bestseller list in 1964, and Humboldt's Gift, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1976 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature while a member of the committee. Generations of students studied with him during those decades.

In 1993 he moved to Boston University, where he co-taught a class with the critic James Wood, and he continued teaching well into old age. His papers are held at the University of Chicago Library, and in 2024 the university's Hyde Park campus hosted the ceremony at which the US Postal Service unveiled a stamp in his honour.

Why it matters

As a teacher for three decades, Bellow passed on his love of literature and ideas to generations of students in his home city.

About Saul Bellow

Chicago novelist of Augie March, Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize and the only writer to take the National Book Award for Fiction three times.

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Saul Bellow

1915–2005 · Literature

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