Three National Book Awards, then the Nobel
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) remains the only fiction writer to win three National Book Awards, then took the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. From a Lachine immigrant childhood to Chicago's great chronicler, he turned ghetto yearning into high American prose.
Born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec—records suggest 10 July, though he celebrated 10 June 1915—two years after Lithuanian-Jewish parents fled Saint Petersburg prosperity for kitchen labor. At nine the family reached Humboldt Park, Chicago; father Abraham sold onions, baked, delivered coal, and bootlegged. Mother Liza, hoping for a rabbi or violinist, died when Saul was seventeen. A childhood respiratory illness locked him into voracious reading; Uncle Tom's Cabin, he said, decided him for writing. Hebrew from age four, Shakespeare, and Russian novels framed a rebellion against "suffocating orthodoxy."
He left Chicago's English department for Northwestern honors in anthropology and sociology, sensing antisemitism in literature halls. The 1930s Federal Writers' Project put him beside Richard Wright and Nelson Algren as a Trotskyist amid Stalinist jibes. Naturalized in 1941 after learning his childhood U.S. entry had been illegal, he served in the merchant marine and finished Dangling Man (1944). A 1948 Guggenheim took him to Paris to begin The Adventures of Augie March (1953), whose picaresque opening made his name. He translated Singer's Gimpel the Fool (1953), taught Minnesota, Puerto Rico—encouraging William Kennedy—and from 1962 spent three decades on Chicago's Committee on Social Thought beside Allan Bloom.
Herzog (1964) became a cerebral bestseller of unsent letters; Humboldt's Gift (1975) modeled Von Humboldt Fleisher on Delmore Schwartz and folded in anthroposophy. The 1976 Nobel address urged writers to wake civilization; he gave the 1977 Jefferson Lecture. Philip Roth later paired him with Faulkner as twentieth-century America's Melville–Hawthorne–Twain spine. He taught into old age at Yale, Princeton, NYU, Bard, and Boston University, dying in Brookline on 5 April 2005, aged eighty-nine—still arguing that learning and nobility might outclimb the century's big-scale insanities.
Source: Saul Bellow
