He is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening. While on a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris, he wrote most of his best-known novel, The Adventures of Augie March.
Franklin Library Saul Bellow books
Humboldt's Gift - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1980
The Dean's December - Limited First Edition Society - 1982
Humboldt's Gift - Pulitzer Prize Classics - 1983
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Who is Saul Bellow?
He was born Solomon (nicknamed 'Sollie') Bellows in Lachine, Quebec (now part of Montreal), shortly after his parents had emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. The family moved to the slums of Chicago, Illinois, the city where he received his schooling and that was to form the backdrop to many of his novels, when he was nine; Bellow's father worked there as an onion importer. His lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. A period of illness in his youth both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his bookishness) and provided an opportunity to satisfy Bellow's hunger for reading: reportedly he decided to be a writer when he first read Uncle Tom's Cabin. John Podhoretz, a pupil at the University of Chicago, said that Bellow and Allan Bloom, a close friend of Bellow (see Ravelstein), 'inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air'.
Here is Podhoretz on Bellow's physical appearance: 'Bellow was then 65, and even at the time was one of the best-looking men on earth despite a set of sadly neglected teeth. (In the 1940s a Hollywood talent scout spotted Bellow’s photograph on the back flap of the dust jacket of his second novel, The Victim, and offered him a screen test.) He was neat, precise, slight and thin. He would speak for three or four minutes and when he had finished, you realised that what he had just done was spontaneously speak a beautifully written essay.'
Career and writing
Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University where he cotaught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss Seize the Day). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow relocated in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir he harim of Brattleboro, Vermont.
Bellow began his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago but left after two years to complete his degree not in English, but in anthropology at Northwestern University. It has been suggested that the study of anthropology had an interesting influence on his literary style.
Before Bellow started his career as a writer he wrote book reviews for ten dollars apiece. His early works earned him the reputation as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century, and by his death he was regarded by many as the greatest living novelist in English. 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:
I judged all modern prose by his. Unfair, certainly, because he made even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths seem like monopodes. Yet what else could I do? I discovered Saul Bellow's prose in my late teens, and henceforth, the relationship had the quality of a love affair about which one could not keep silent. Over the last week, much has been said about Bellow's prose, and most of the praise perhaps because it has been overwhelmingly by men—has tended toward the robust: We hear about Bellow's mixing of high and low registers, his Melvillean cadences jostling the jivey Yiddish rhythms, the great teeming democracy of the big novels, the crooks and frauds and intellectuals who loudly people the brilliant sensorium of the fiction. All of this is true enough; John Cheever, in his journals, lamented that, alongside Bellow's fiction, his stories seemed like mere suburban splinters. Ian McEwan wisely suggested last week that British writers and critics may have been attracted to Bellow precisely because he kept alive a Dickensian amplitude now lacking in the English novel. But nobody mentioned the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself. In truth, I could not thank him enough when he was alive, and I cannot now.
Examples of Prose
(1) This is the famous and often quoted beginning of Augie March:
I am an American, Chicago-born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
Everyone knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.
Adam Mars-Jones's gloss on this is: 'Maybe the fact that he starts low and goes high, rather than starting high and going low, in terms of cultural reference, was a breakthrough in its own way.'
(2) This longer excerpt from James Wood's review of the Atlas biography is an attempt to explain Bellow's genius (for the full article see Bibliography, 'On Bellow'):
Perhaps nothing is more movingly comic in the whole of Bellow than the scene in The Adventures of Augie March, in which Einhorn, a Chicago autodidact, writes an obituary of his father for the local newspaper. Stiff, clumsy, noble, the obituary is foolishly, ambitiously 'intellectual,' and the reader is able to see, in a paragraph, the quavering pretensions of a generation of intelligent American Jews:
Einhorn kept me with him that evening; he didn't want to be alone. While I sat by he wrote his father's obituary in the form of an editorial for the neighborhood paper. 'The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp and left it a great city. He came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, in flight from the conscription of the Habsburg tyrant, and in his life as a builder proved that great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves, like the pyramids of Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian marches. The lesson of an American life like my father's, in contrast to that of the murderer of the Strelitzes and of his own son, is that achievements are compatible with decency. My father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher, saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside in the last moments. . .' This was the vein of it, and he composed it energetically in half an hour, printing on sheets of paper at his desk, the tip of his tongue forward, scrunched up in his bathrobe and wearing his stocking cap.
I doubt that this could be bettered by Dickens or Joyce, and when we read it we are splashed by the antique streams of the greatest comedy. We begin the obituary in laughter and end it in tears, in a sublime dapple of emotions. Everything is here: the ungrammatical pompousness of the unpracticed writer ('leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp'. . . 'saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside'), the rambling, feebly chanelled anarchy ('he came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow'), the intellectual hauteur that crumbles into non-sequitur ('my father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher'), the historical allusions hanging off the sentences like sloths ('in flight from the conscription of the Habsburg tyrant'), and finally Einhorn's affecting, foolhardy American optimism, whereby this new land proves that 'great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves.' Such care, such favoring finesse! Note that Bellow does not have Einhorn write 'Plato's observation that,' which is the formulation that a real intellectual would use, but the more upholstered and uneasy 'the observation of Plato,' a phrase whose awkwardness enshrines a certain distance from Plato. And what a delicious word 'observation' is here—as if Plato were someone who tossed off mots like Wilde.
(3) From 'The Old System':
On the airport bus, he opened his father's copy of the Psalms. The black Hebrew letters only gaped at him like open mouths with tongues hanging down, pointing upward, flaming but dumb. He tried—forcing. It did no good. The tunnel, the swamps, the auto skeletons, machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark trembling in fiery summer, held his attention minutely.... Then in the plane running with concentrated fury to take off—the power to pull away from the magnetic earth, and more: When he saw the ground tilt backward, the machine rising from the runway, he said to himself in clear internal words, "Shema Yisroel," Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels turned toward the river. The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind. Isaac released the breath he had been holding, but sat belted tight. Above the marvelous bridges, over clouds, sailing in atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.
Saul Bellow quotes
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
"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."
"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
"Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos."
Saul Bellow books in order
Dangling Man (1944)
The Victim (1947)
The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Seize the Day (1956)
Henderson the Rain King (1959)
Herzog (1964)
Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)
Humboldt's Gift (1975)
The Dean's December (1982)
More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
A Theft (1989)
The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
The Actual (1997)
Ravelstein (2000)
Short Story Collections
Mosby's Memoirs (1968)
Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)
Collected Stories (2001)
Non-Fiction
To Jerusalem and Back (1976) - Memoir
It All Adds Up (1994) - Essay collection
Translations
Gimpel the Fool (1945) by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Source and additional information: Saul Bellow