Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) — born Solomon Bellows on 10 June 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents — was the preeminent American novelist of the post-war era. He grew up in Chicago, which became the setting for much of his fiction. He studied at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, and taught at the University of Chicago for most of his career.

Life and Career

Bellow’s first two novels — Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) — are short, tightly controlled works influenced by Dostoevsky and the European existentialists. They are accomplished but constrained.

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) changed everything. The novel’s famous opening — “I am an American, Chicago born” — announced a new voice in American fiction: expansive, exuberant, intellectually omnivorous, colloquial and elevated at the same time. The sentence-by-sentence energy of Augie March — its picaresque sweep, its appetite for experience, its refusal of the tight formalism that dominated post-war American fiction — was a liberation.

Henderson the Rain King (1959) — about a millionaire who goes to Africa seeking spiritual transformation — is the most exuberant of Bellow’s novels. Herzog (1964) — about Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual in crisis who writes unsent letters to the living and the dead — is his masterpiece: a novel that manages to be simultaneously a comedy of ideas, a portrait of male middle-class breakdown, and a sustained meditation on the relationship between thinking and feeling. It was a bestseller — an unusual achievement for a novel so intellectually dense.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) — about an elderly Holocaust survivor in late-1960s New York — is his most controversial novel, attacked by some critics for its conservatism and its portrayal of African Americans. Humboldt’s Gift (1975) — about the relationship between a successful writer and his failed, brilliant friend, based on Bellow’s friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz — won the Pulitzer Prize.

Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. His later novels — The Dean’s December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), Ravelstein (2000, based on his friendship with Allan Bloom) — are uneven but contain passages of extraordinary power.

Major Works and Themes

Bellow’s great subject was the life of the mind in America — the situation of the intellectual, the thinker, the reader, in a culture that is indifferent or hostile to ideas. His protagonists are men (always men) who think too much, who are besieged by ideas, who cannot stop analysing their own experience even as they are living it.

His prose style — a unique synthesis of Yiddish cadence, Chicago street talk, and high-literary allusion — is the most distinctive voice in post-war American fiction. No one else sounds like Bellow.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Bellow is now recognized as the most important American novelist between Faulkner and the present day. His influence on subsequent American fiction — Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Joseph Heller — is immense.

Key Works

• The Adventures of Augie March (1953) — National Book Award
• Herzog (1964) — National Book Award
• Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) — National Book Award
• Humboldt’s Gift (1975) — Pulitzer Prize
• Ravelstein (2000)

Collecting Bellow

Dangling Man (1944, Vanguard Press) — the debut — is scarce: $300–$1,000.

The Adventures of Augie March (1953, Viking) — the breakthrough — brings $200–$800 in jacket.

Herzog (1964, Viking) — the bestselling masterpiece — brings $100–$400.

Humboldt’s Gift (1975, Viking) brings $40–$150.

Bellow signed at book events and university functions. His Nobel Prize in 1976 increased demand for signed copies. Viking first editions are the standard collected form for the major novels. Limited editions from various publishers are also collected. Bellow died in 2005; all signed copies are finite.