Versión en español

Date and Place of birth:
b. June 10, 1915, Lachine, Quebec, Canadá
d. April 6, 2005, Brookline, Massachusetts, U. S.

Life and Works:

Bellow's parents emigrated in 1913 from Russia to Montreal. When he was nine they moved to Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University (B.S., 1937), and afterward combined writing with a teaching career at various universities, including the University of Minnesota, Princeton University, New York University, Bard College, the University of Chicago, and Boston University.

He won a reputation among a small group of readers with his first two novels, Dangling Man (1944), a story in diary form of a man waiting to be inducted into the army, and The Victim (1947), a subtle study of the relationship between a Jew and a Gentile, each of whom becomes the other's victim.

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) brought wider acclaim and won the National Book Award (1954). It is a picaresque story of a poor Jewish youth from Chicago, his progress—sometimes highly comic—through the world of the 20th century, and his attempts to make sense of it. In this novel Bellow employed for the first time a loose, breezy style in conscious revolt against the preoccupation of writers of that time with perfection of form.

Henderson the Rain King (1959) continued the picaresque approach in its tale of an eccentric American millionaire on a quest in Africa. Seize the Day (1956), a novella, is a unique treatment of a failure in a society where the only success is success. He also wrote a volume of short stories, Mosby's Memoirs (1968), and To Jerusalem and Back (1976) about a trip to Israel.

In his later novels and novellas—Herzog (1964; National Book Award, 1965), Mr. Sammler's Planet(1970; National Book Award, 1971), Humboldt's Gift (1975; Pulitzer Prize, 1976), The Dean's December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), and The Bellarosa Connection (1989)—Bellow arrived at his most characteristic vein. The heroes of these works are often Jewish intellectuals whose interior monologues range from the sublime to the absurd. At the same time, their surrounding world, peopled by energetic and incorrigible realists, acts as a corrective to their intellectual speculations. It is this combination of cultural sophistication and the wisdom of the streets that constitutes Bellow's greatest originality.

Other recent books from his author are:

• Ravelstein by Saul Bellow (2001)
• Him With His Foot in His Mouth: And Other Stories by Saul Bellow (May 1998)
• Seize the day by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick (Introduction) (1996)
• It All Adds Up: From the dim Past to the Uncertain Future by Saul Bellow (June 1995)

Some books about Saul Bellow:

• Bellow - A biography by James Atlas (Hardcover)
• Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) by Harold Bloom (Editor) (June 2000)