Saul Bellow - Early life, Career, Criticism, Bibliography, In music
Writer, born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada. The son of immigrant Russian Jews, in 1924 he moved with his family to Chicago, the city with which he became most closely identified. He studied anthropology and sociology at Northwestern University and for most of his life taught intellectual history in universities, including Minnesota (19469) and Chicago (1963). During World War 2 he served in the merchant marine. His first novel, Dangling Man (1944), was followed by a steady output of major fiction, including the novels The Adventures of Augie March (1953, National Book Award), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1963, National Book Award), Mr Sammler's Planet (1969, National Book Award), and Humboldt's Gift (1975, Pulitzer). This work, much of which treated with compassion and wit the spiritual crisis of Modernism while drawing on his own feelings of alienation from contemporary society, established him as America's most distinguished post-war writer of fiction. His later work included the novels The Dean's December (1982) and More Die of Heartbreak (1987), the collected stories Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1984) and The Bellarosa Connection (1989), and the play The Last Analysis (1965). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
Bellow is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening, echoing his Jewish heritage.
Early life
He was born Solomon (nicknamed 'Sollie') Bellow in Lachine, Quebec (now part of Montreal), shortly after his parents had emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. 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 student 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'.
Career
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 moved in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89.
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.
Before Bellow started his career as a writer he wrote book reviews for ten dollars apiece. 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. James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in The New Republic, wrote:
I judged all modern prose by his. 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. 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.Criticism
Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the 19th century European novel.
Bellow's account of his own 1975 trip to Israel, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, was criticized by Noam Chomsky in his 1983 book Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel & Bellow, Chomsky wrote, "sees an Israel where ‘almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare,’ where the people ‘think so hard, and so much’ as they ‘farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and finally create an army of tough fighters.’ He has also been criticized for having praised Joan Peters's controversial book, From Time Immemorial, which challenged the conventional history of the Palestinian people.
In an interview in the March 7, 1988 New Yorker, Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
Despite his identification with Chicago, he kept aloof from some of that city's more conventional writers. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering.
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