Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate who wove memoir from his Jewish upbringing and his adult life in academia into what came to define the United States’s post-war literature of opportunity, has died aged 89.
The creator of Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and other novels had been in declining health for some time, Bellow’s close friend and attorney, Walter Pozen, said on Tuesday, but was ”wonderfully sharp to the end”. His wife and daughter were at his bedside in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he died.
Bellow, who was born in Quebec and raised in Chicago, was the most famous of the generation of Jewish writers that emerged after World War II, combining the immigrant’s hustle and the bookworm’s brains with the idealism of a romantic.
Tributes came in from Bellow’s contemporaries in that post-war set of writers on Tuesday.
”The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists — William Faulkner and Saul Bellow,” Philip Roth said. ”Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne and Twain of the 20th century.”
In a long career — his much-praised novel Ravelstein was published just five years ago at the age of 84 — Bellow was the first American writer to win the National Book Award three times: in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, in 1965 for Herzog and in 1971 for Mr Sammler’s Planet.
He went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for Humboldt’s Gift in 1976, an honour that for many other writers had often signalled the waning of their powers. But Bellow kept on writing, producing The Actual, a sentimental novella, in 1997, and Ravelstein, a barely disguised account of his friend, the late philosopher Allan Bloom.
From his earliest days, Bellow was determined to depart from the sparely written and macho American brand of story-telling, falling back on a self-absorbed intellectual as narrator and plundering his often tumultuous personal life for material.
For half a century, friends and relatives glimpsed pieces of themselves in his books. Later, literary colleagues began to make their appearances. In 1975, he turned the life of the alcoholic poet Delmore Schwartz into Humboldt’s Gift, and more than two decades later created his monument to Bloom.
His lengthy career was marked by celebrated feuds with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, and a highly complicated personal life.
Born in 1915 to Russian immigrants, Bellow grew up in a chaotic Yiddish-speaking household in a town outside Montreal. After moving to Chicago with his family at the age of nine, he went on to study anthropology at Northwestern University.
After teaching for many years at the University of Chicago, Bellow accepted a position at Boston University.
In 1999, his fifth wife, Janis Freedman, gave birth to a girl, Naomi, Bellow’s first daughter after three adult sons. — Guardian Unlimited Â