Saul Bellow

He had three elder siblings - sister Zelda (later Jane, born in 1907), brothers Moishe (later Maurice, born in 1908) and Schmuel (later Samuel, born in 1911).

Bellow's family was Lithuanian-Jewish; his father was born in Vilnius.

Bellow celebrated his birthday on June 10, although he appears to have been born on July 10, according to records from the Jewish Genealogical Society-Montreal.

(In the Jewish community, it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth, which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar.) Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote: "The retrospective was strong in me because of my parents. They were both full of the notion that they were falling, falling. They had been prosperous cosmopolitans in Saint Petersburg. My mother could never stop talking about the family dacha, her privileged life, and how all that was now gone. She was working in the kitchen. Cooking, washing, mending ... There had been servants in Russia ... But you could always transpose from your humiliating condition with the help of a sort of embittered irony."

A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, the city that formed the backdrop of many of his novels.

Bellow's father, Abraham, had become an onion importer.

He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger.

Bellow's mother, Liza, died when he was 17.

She had been deeply religious and wanted her youngest son, Saul, to become a rabbi or a concert violinist.

But he rebelled against what he later called the "suffocating orthodoxy" of his religious upbringing, and he began writing at a young age.

Bellow's lifelong love for the Torah began at four when he learned Hebrew.

Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian–American writer.

In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Federal Writer's Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.

Many of the writers were radical: if they were not members of the Communist Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause.

Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning writers, he had to suffer their taunts.

In 1941, Bellow became a naturalized United States citizen, after discovering, on attempting to enlist in the armed forces, that he had immigrated to the United States illegally as a child.

In 1943, Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.

During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.

In his 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King, Bellow modeled the character King Dahfu on Rosenfeld.

Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University.

He originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department was anti-Jewish.

Instead, he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology.

It has been suggested Bellow's study of anthropology had an influence on his literary style, and anthropological references pepper his works.

He later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin.

Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom (see Ravelstein), John Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air."

For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.

He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited

the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.

His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift, and Ravelstein.

Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself.

Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec.

As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses."

Bellow's protagonists wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean in The Dean's December, called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century."

This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents, Lescha (née Gordin) and Abraham Bellows, emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Bellow also grew up reading Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century.

In Chicago, he took part in anthroposophical studies at the Anthroposophical Society of Chicago.

Bellow attended Tuley High School on Chicago's west side where he befriended Yetta Barsh and Isaac Rosenfeld.