Saul Bellow

Comic, thinking novels about the restless modern self (1944-2000)

• He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he also won the Pulitzer Prize (1976) and the National Medal of Arts (1988).^{[12],[13],[14]}
• Along with Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, he helped move the stories of Jewish immigrants and their striving children from the margins to the center of American literature.^[11]
• His 1953 English version of Gimpel the Fool largely introduced Isaac Bashevis Singer to American readers; scholars now argue that Eliezer Greenberg deserved credit as co-translator.^[22]
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) put a Holocaust survivor at the center of a major American novel and won the National Book Award.^[12],[13]
• He taught at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought from 1962 to 1993, then for about a decade at Boston University.^[15],[17]
• In 2024 the U.S. Postal Service honored him with a stamp in its Literary Arts series, describing him as a chronicler of the immigrant experience.^[13]

Bellow's impact lies in how people understand themselves and in who gets to tell America's story, and it cannot be honestly counted. His novels sold widely, Herzog alone more than 100,000 copies, and won almost every major American literary prize. More important, he helped move Jewish immigrant experience from the margins to the center of American fiction, opening space for the writers who followed. His translation helped bring Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish stories to English readers, and he taught students for decades in Chicago and Boston. His reputation has also shrunk: remarks and passages many readers see as racist have kept him off many university reading lists. We therefore make no quantified impact claims; there is no credible way to count readers moved, minds changed or writers inspired.

CultureEducation

No number is given here on purpose. Some contributions cannot be counted honestly, and we would rather describe them than invent a figure.

• Moderate

  The 'Tolstoy of the Zulus' remark

  In 1988 the journalist James Atlas reported that Bellow, criticizing opposition to Western-civilization courses, had asked who the Tolstoy of the Zulus and the Proust of the Papuans were. Many read it as a racist dismissal of non-Western cultures. In a 1994 New York Times essay Bellow said he had been talking about literate and pre-literate societies. His biographer says the remark helped make him unwelcome on campuses.^[6],[19]

• Moderate

  Portrayals of Black Americans and a blocked street name

  Mr. Sammler's Planet includes a menacing Black pickpocket who is given no dialogue. Journalist Brent Staples, who read Bellow as a Black graduate student in Hyde Park, was angered by passages he saw as voicing white fear of Black neighbors. In 2007 Alderman Toni Preckwinkle blocked a Hyde Park street name for Bellow over his treatment of Black and Latino people. Leader argues the novel is not racist; Studs Terkel judged Bellow not a racist but too fearful of Black people.^{[6],[18],[20]}

• Minor

  Harsh portraits of wives and friends

  Bellow drew heavily on real people. Herzog's savage portrait of a character modeled on his second wife drew feminist criticism, and Ravelstein (2000) was criticized for revealing that his friend Allan Bloom, the model for its hero, was gay and had died of AIDS. Henderson the Rain King was also criticized for its depiction of African characters.^[6],[10]

• 1913

  Persecution

  Russian law barred most Jews from living outside the Pale of Settlement. Bellow's father lived in St. Petersburg on a forged residence license; in 1913 he was arrested for lacking proper papers (and possibly for dealing in forged ones), escaped from prison and fled with his family to Canada, two years before Saul was born.^[7],[8]

• 1923

  Poverty

  In Montreal the family was poor. His father failed as a farmer, baker, junk dealer and more, and turned to small-scale bootlegging; in 1923 he was robbed, beaten and left in a ditch while trying to run whiskey to the border.^[7],[10]

• 1923

  Discrimination

  At eight, Bellow spent months in a Montreal hospital after an emergency appendectomy and serious infections. He later said some of the nurses never let him forget that he was Jewish, which made him furious.^[9]

• 1924

  Other

  The family was smuggled across the border from Canada and settled in Chicago without legal status. Bellow did not become a U.S. citizen until the early 1940s (1943 in most sources).^{[9],[10],[13]}

• 1937

  Discrimination

  When he graduated from Northwestern, the head of the English department told him that English was not his language and suggested anthropology. Bellow later told the Paris Review he had been given to understand that, as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews, he could never truly feel at home in English literary tradition.^[6],[11]

• —

  Quota

  In the 1920s and 1930s informal quotas sharply limited the number of Jewish students at many private colleges and professional schools, and historians regard the 1930s as a high point of antisemitism in the United States. Bellow himself studied at the University of Chicago and Northwestern.^[21]

Both of Bellow's parents were Russian Jews. His father had studied at a yeshiva, and his mother was Orthodox. The family spoke Yiddish at home, and Bellow was fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew. As a young man he turned from religious study to literature and radical politics, and he disliked being called a 'Jewish writer'. Yet he said his earliest awareness was of a world in which he was a Jew, and his biographer says he saw being Jewish as a permanent fact of his life. Jewish characters, antisemitism and the Holocaust run through his fiction, he wrote a book about Israel, and B'nai B'rith honored him for excellence in Jewish literature.^{[2],[6],[7],[8],[10],[11],[12],[13],[14],[17]}

1. 1913

   His father, arrested in St. Petersburg for living there without proper residence papers, escapes and takes the family to Canada.^[7],[8]

2. June 10, 1915

   Born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, near Montreal, the fourth child of Russian Jewish immigrants.^{[1],[10],[13]}

3. 1923

   Aged eight, spends months in a Montreal hospital after an emergency appendectomy; some nurses are hostile to him for being Jewish.^[9]

4. 1924

   The family is smuggled into the United States and settles, without legal status, in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood.^{[9],[10],[14]}

5. 1937

   Graduates from Northwestern University with honors in sociology and anthropology. Told that English is not his language, he starts graduate study in anthropology at Wisconsin.^[2],[6]

6. 1943

   Becomes a U.S. citizen (most sources give 1943; some give 1941).^[9],[13]

7. 1944

   Publishes his first novel, Dangling Man; during World War II he serves in the Merchant Marine.^[2],[10]

8. 1953

   Publishes The Adventures of Augie March, begun in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship; it wins the 1954 National Book Award. His Gimpel the Fool translation appears.^{[2],[12],[22]}

9. 1962

   Joins the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, where he teaches until 1993.^[15]

10. 1964

    Herzog becomes a No. 1 best-seller and wins the 1965 National Book Award.^[10],[12]

11. 1967

    Covers the Arab-Israeli war as a correspondent for Newsday.^[2]

12. 1976

    Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift and the Nobel Prize in Literature; publishes To Jerusalem and Back, about his months in Israel.^[1],[2],[14]

13. April 5, 2005

    Dies at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, aged 89.^[1],[16]

1. 1.Saul Bellow - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
2. 2.Saul Bellow - Biographical · NobelPrize.org (from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980), 1976
3. 3.Saul Bellow - Nobel Lecture, 12 December 1976 · NobelPrize.org, 1976
4. 4.The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976 - Press release · NobelPrize.org (Swedish Academy), 1976
5. 5.The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976 - Award ceremony speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow · NobelPrize.org, 1976
6. 6.Author Interview: Biographer Zachary Leader on Saul Bellow (interview by Robert Siegel) · Moment Magazine, 2019
7. 7.The Life of Saul Bellow (excerpt from Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, Knopf) · Literary Hub, 2015
8. 8.Saul Bellow at 100 (review of Zachary Leader's The Life of Saul Bellow, vol. 1) · Washington Free Beacon, 2015
9. 9.That Somber City: In Search of Saul Bellow's Montreal · Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018
10. 10.Saul Bellow biography and life timeline (American Masters) · PBS / WNET, 2022
11. 11.Saul Bellow wanted Jewish stories to be seen as American stories (American Masters) · PBS / WNET, 2022
12. 12.Saul Bellow (National Book Awards honors) · National Book Foundation
13. 13.Literary Arts Series Spotlights Novelist Saul Bellow · United States Postal Service, 2024
14. 14.Saul Bellow Biography (One Book, One Chicago) · Chicago Public Library, 2011
15. 15.He seized the day · The University of Chicago Magazine, 2005
16. 16.Author Saul Bellow Dies at Age 89 · NPR, 2005
17. 17.Remembering Saul Bellow · BU Today, Boston University, 2005
18. 18.Saul Bellow · My Jewish Learning
19. 19.Saul Bellow's Unlikely Role in the Development of Ralph Ellison's Posthumous Reputation (Paul Devlin, Issue 17.2) · Literary Matters (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers)
20. 20.Exile on Bellow's street · Chicago Reader, 2007
21. 21.Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota (A Campus Divided) · University of Minnesota
22. 22.Isaac Bashevis Singer in a Yiddish Opera: David Schiff's Gimpel the Fool (Neil W. Levin) · YIVO Institute for Jewish Research