Bellow, Saul - 1915–, American novelist, b. Lachine, Que., grad. Northwestern Univ., 1937. Born of Russian-Jewish parents, he grew up in the slums of Montreal and Chicago. His fiction, which features uniquely telling character portrayals, often reveals the conflicts between moral anomie and the quest for a personal ethic, and between the imaginative individual and the sometimes indifferent, sometimes entangling world. In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels include Dangling Man (1944), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), Humboldt's Gift (1975; Pulitzer Prize), The Dean's December (1982), and Ravelstein (2000). He has published four books of stories, Mosby's Memoirs (1968), Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984), Something to Remember Me By (1991), and Collected Stories (2001); a novella, The Actual (1997); a memoir, To Jerusalem and Back (1976); a play, The Last Analysis (1964); and an essay collection, It All Adds Up (1994).
See G. L. Cronin and B. Siegel, ed., Conversations with Saul Bellow (1994); J. Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (2000); studies by I. Malin (1969), M. Harris (1980), D. Fuchs (1984), P. Hyland (1992), and G. Bach, ed. (1995); bibliography by G. L. Cronin and B. H. Hall (2d ed. 1987). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |