Bellow, Saul 1915-
US writer and Nobel Prize winner

He was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada, the son of immigrant Russian parents, and spent his childhood in Montreal. In 1924 his family moved to Chicago, a city that was to figure largely in his fiction, and he attended university there and at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois. He abandoned his post-graduate studies at Wisconsin University to become a writer, and his first novel, The Dangling Man, a study of a man in pre-draft limbo, appeared in 1944. He became an associate professor at Minnesota University, and after being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 travelled to Paris and Rome. Other works include The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler's Planet (1970), Humboldt's Gift (1975), The Dean's December (1982) and More Die of Heartbreak (1986). Most are concerned with the fate of liberal humanism in a violent and absurd environment which has severed the present from an intellectually and emotionally nourishing past. In 1962 he was appointed a professor at the University of Chicago, and in 1976 was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His recent publications include a volume of three tales, Something to Remember Me By (1991) and a collection of essays, It All Adds Up (1994).

Bibliography: J Braham, A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Bellow's Fiction (1984); M Bradbury, Bellow (1982)