Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow is a 1976 Nobel Prize winning Jewish-Canadian-American writer.

The son of Russian immigrants, he spent most of his life in Chicago and was closely associated with the city. His first novel, The Dangling Man (1944), was written while Bellow was a Merchant Marine during World War II and published in 1944. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 allowed him to travel in Europe and work on The Adventures of Augie March (1953), a National Book Award winner in 1954. Bellow followed it with a collection in Seize the Day (1956), the novella which many consider to be his finest work. The  the title novella - about one day in the life of a middle-aged New Yorker facing a major domestic crisis.  His 1959 novel, Henderson, The Rain King, was a commercial and critical success, and Bellows was hailed as one of America's finest writers. Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) both won National Book Awards, and Humboldt's Gift (1975) earned Bellows a Pulitzer Prize. Bellows wrote about modern man -- an urban American Jew in most cases -- and the attempt to find identity and spiritual comfort in a neurotic and alienating society. He also wrote essays, short stories and plays, and taught for many years at the University of Chicago, and, after 1993, Boston University. His other books include More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989) and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), his non-fiction account of his 1975 sojourn to Israel.

Bellow was married five times, the last time to Janis Freedman, a former student who was more than 40 years younger; in 1999 they had a daughter, when Bellow was 84 years old.