Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005), was an acclaimed Canadian-born American Jewish writer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and 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.

Early life

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'.

Related Topics:
Lachine, Quebec - Montreal - St. Petersburg - Russia - Chicago, Illinois - Bible - Hebrew - Uncle Tom's Cabin - John Podhoretz - University of Chicago - Allan Bloom - Ravelstein

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Here is Podhoretz on Bellow's physical appearance (see links): '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.'

Related Topics:
Links - 1940s - Hollywood - Screen test

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