Saul Bellow · Arts & Literature
Novelist
1915, Lachine, Quebec, Canada — 2005, Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
Canada · United States (Chicago)
Saul Bellow is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Novelist
Origins and early life
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, on 10 June 1915, two years after his parents Lescha and Abraham emigrated from Saint Petersburg; the family was Lithuanian-Jewish and his father came from Druya, a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement. He grew up largely in Chicago, in a household that never stopped measuring the present against what Russia had been — his mother, he wrote, could not stop talking about the dacha and the servants while she worked in the kitchen.
Work and career
That double vision became his subject. In The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog and Humboldt's Gift he wrote an American novel that could carry philosophy and street life in the same sentence, in a Jewish-American voice nobody had put on the page that way before.
Recognition
He remains the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times, in 1954, 1965 and 1971. In 1976 he took both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish committee citing his blend of picaresque narrative and analysis of the culture. The National Medal of Arts followed in 1988 and the National Book Foundation's lifetime medal in 1990. He died on 5 April 2005; the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in his honour in Chicago in 2024.
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Source: Nobel Prize Literature 1976
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Novelist
Source: Nobel Prize Literature 1976
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