Born in Lachine
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, a working-class suburb of Montreal, in 1915. He always celebrated his birthday on 10 June, although Montreal records suggest he may actually have been born on 10 July, a mix-up that probably arose because his family, like many observant Jews, marked birthdays by the Hebrew calendar. His parents, Abraham and Lescha Bellows, were Lithuanian Jews who had lived in Saint Petersburg and emigrated to Canada in 1913. Solomon was the youngest of four children.
Yiddish was spoken at home, and he began learning Hebrew at four; the rhythms of the Torah stayed with him for life. His mother was devout and hoped he would become a rabbi or a concert violinist. A long childhood illness confined him for months, and he filled the time by reading, he later said that Uncle Tom’s Cabin first made him want to be a writer.
A Chicago education
When he was nine the family moved to Chicago and settled in the immigrant neighbourhood of Humboldt Park on the West Side. His father tried his hand at one business after another, importing onions, working in a bakery, delivering coal and, during Prohibition, bootlegging. His mother died when Saul was seventeen, and he rebelled against what he would later call the suffocating orthodoxy of his upbringing, though never against the books. At Tuley High School he formed a lifelong friendship with the writer Isaac Rosenfeld, and with his friends he devoured Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Chicago would become the great backdrop of his fiction, vulgar, vital and, he believed, more representative of America than New York. He began at the University of Chicago, then transferred to Northwestern, where he graduated in 1937 with honours in anthropology and sociology. He had wanted to study literature, but felt the English department was hostile to Jews. He began graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, then returned to Chicago, where he worked on the Federal Writers’ Project alongside Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.
Finding a voice
Like many young intellectuals of the 1930s, Bellow was drawn to Trotskyism; in 1940 he travelled to Mexico City hoping to meet Leon Trotsky, only to arrive the day after the exiled revolutionary was murdered. When he tried to enlist in the armed forces he discovered that he had entered the United States illegally as a child, and he was naturalised in 1941. He served in the merchant marine, and in 1944 published his first novel, Dangling Man, the journal of a young Chicagoan waiting to be drafted. The Victim followed in 1947, a taut, disturbing study of a Jewish man in New York tormented by a gentile acquaintance who accuses him of ruining his life, one of the most searching novels about antisemitism written in America.
Both books were admired, but they were careful and constrained. In 1948 a Guggenheim Fellowship took him to Paris, and there his writing loosened dramatically. He began The Adventures of Augie March, a sprawling, exuberant picaresque about a poor Jewish boy from Chicago living by his wits, written in a voice that mixed street slang with philosophy and the Bible. Its opening, “I am an American, Chicago born”, announced a new kind of American novel.
The great novels
Augie March (1953) won the National Book Award and made Bellow’s name. The same year he translated Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish story “Gimpel the Fool” for Partisan Review, introducing Singer to English-speaking readers. Then came a string of books that critics still rank among the finest of the century: the novella Seize the Day (1956), about a failing salesman on one disastrous day in Manhattan; Henderson the Rain King (1959), a comic quest set in an imaginary Africa; and Herzog (1964), the story of a cuckolded professor who writes letters he never sends to friends, enemies, philosophers and the dead. Herzog, to Bellow’s surprise, became a bestseller and won him a second National Book Award.
The early novels in this run are among his most concentrated. Seize the Day follows Tommy Wilhelm, a middle-aged failure who has lost his job and his marriage and gambles his last savings on the commodities market, through a single day that ends with him weeping at a stranger’s funeral. Henderson, by contrast, is a booming American millionaire who flees to Africa in search of meaning; Bellow said Henderson was the character most like himself.
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), narrated by an elderly Holocaust survivor looking with horror and compassion at New York in the late 1960s, brought a third, making him the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times. Humboldt’s Gift (1975), a comic elegy for his friend the poet Delmore Schwartz, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1976 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”
What he gave American letters
Bellow’s achievement was to bring the restless, argumentative, self-mocking voice of the immigrant city into the centre of American literature. His heroes are thinkers trapped in bodies, appetites and bad marriages; they quote Spinoza and worry about alimony in the same breath. He fused high culture and street talk, comedy and metaphysics, and showed a generation of writers that the inner life of an urban intellectual could be as large a subject as the frontier or the war.
His influence was immense. Philip Roth, his friend and protégé, said that the backbone of twentieth-century American literature had been provided by two novelists, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Martin Amis called him the greatest American author ever. He was not without detractors, some critics found his novels too talky or old-fashioned, and Vladimir Nabokov privately dismissed him, but by the end of his life he was widely regarded as the greatest living American novelist.
A Jewish writer, on his own terms
Jewish life and memory run all through Bellow’s work, from the immigrant families of Augie March to the Holocaust survivor Artur Sammler and the late novella The Bellarosa Connection (1989), about a Jew rescued from Fascist Italy. Yet he resisted being filed away as a “Jewish writer.” He called the label “Jewish writers in America” a repulsive category, and mocked the critical habit of grouping him with Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth by joking that the three were the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of American letters, a famous menswear firm, and a jab at how readily America pictured Jews as tailors rather than artists.
His bond with Israel was nonetheless deep. During the Six-Day War of 1967 he reported from the front for Newsday. After several months in Jerusalem in 1975 he published To Jerusalem and Back (1976), a personal account of Israel’s politics and dangers, and in 1968 he received the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for excellence in Jewish literature. He was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Vermont.
The teacher and the man
In 1962 Bellow returned to Chicago as a professor on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where he taught for more than thirty years alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom. He also taught at Minnesota, Princeton, Bard, Yale, New York University, Puerto Rico and, from 1993, Boston University. He loved the classroom, played the violin and followed sports with enthusiasm.
His private life was turbulent. He married five times, to Anita Goshkin, Sondra Tschacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea and Janis Freedman, and the first four marriages ended in divorce. Ex-wives and friends often recognised themselves, not always happily, in his fiction. He had three sons and, at the age of eighty-four, a daughter. As he grew older his politics moved from the left toward cultural conservatism, and some of his remarks about multiculturalism and race drew sharp criticism, including a disputed quip about the “Tolstoy of the Zulus” that he later said had been taken out of context.
Late work and death
Bellow kept writing into his eighties. His last novel, Ravelstein (2000), was a frank, affectionate portrait of Allan Bloom, who had died in 1992, and some critics considered it among his most moving books. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
His life has been the subject of major biographies, including James Atlas’s Bellow (2000) and Zachary Leader’s two-volume The Life of Saul Bellow (2015 and 2018), and of a memoir by his eldest son, Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart (2013). In 1977 he gave the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government’s highest honour for achievement in the humanities, and in 2024 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honour.
Saul Bellow died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on 5 April 2005, aged 89. A stretch of West Augusta Boulevard in his old Humboldt Park neighbourhood is named Saul Bellow Way, a library in Lachine bears his name, and the Library of America has published his novels in four volumes. Few writers have done more to show that the immigrant’s child, arguing with God and with the city, could speak for all of America.
Sources & further reading
Saul Bellow, Wikipedia · Saul Bellow, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Author Saul Bellow Dies at Age 89, NPR, 5 April 2005 · The Jewbird, Jewish Review of Books · Saul Bellow: “Jewish Writer in America”, Mosaic · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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