Saul Bellow was born on 10 July 1915 in Montreal, Canada, two years after his parents had immigrated there from Russia. His father was a daring and not always successful businessman who in Russia had imported Egyptian onions and in the New World attempted several often unconventional businesses. His mother was an ambitious woman, who wished her son to become a Talmudic Scholar. Bellow grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal and was “generally preoccupied with what went on in it and watched from the stairs and windows” (DALB, 82). He attended cheder, where he learned Hebrew thoroughly and at home he spoke Yiddish. His Yiddish is fluent. He has translated a number of stories, including Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, and he has written an introduction to, a collection of Jewish short stories.
When he was nines in 1924, the Bellow family moved to Chicago where the sensitive BOY began to imbibe American culture. He often went to the public library to read the novels and poems of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser instead of the Talmud. In 1933, he graduated from Tuley High School and enrolled in the University of Chicago where he was quite unhappy. During these days, Bellow suffered the disease of so many undergraduates that he described in the opening lines of his Nobel Lecture many years later: “I was a very contrary undergraduate more than forty years ago. It was my habit to register for a course and then to do most of my reading in another field of study, so that when I should have been grinding away at ‘Money and Banking’ I was reading the novels of Joseph Conrad “(AS, 316). He felt the dense cultural atmosphere to him suffocating and transferred to Northwestern University in 1935. Here he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1937, graduating with honors in anthropology and sociology, the science of human beings and human society. These subjects certainly affected his novels once he started to write.
From 1938 to 1942, caught up in the depression, Bellow worked for the Work Projects Administration, preparing short biographies of American writers and also taught for four years at a teacher’s college in Chicago. During WWII, he severed in the Merchant Marine and then settled down to a career of writing and teaching at various universities. He has been married five times, which is perhaps the reason that many male characters in his books have troubles with women. Bellow is now a professor at the University of Chicago. He teaches whatever he likes and takes as much time as he needs for his writing.
Bellow lives in a period in which modern writers are interested in literature of despair. To them, modern society is frightful, brutal, hostile, a wasteland and a horror. Their literary works are marked by a shared sense of loss, exile, and alienation. In recent American fictions, there have been the victimized innocent child, the lonely youth, the Negro without identity, the Jew involved in guilt and self-betrayal, the grotesque, the underdog —- all marginal, disaffiliated characters. Especially in Jewish literature. “The virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness, the company of the dispossessed, the sanctity of the insulted and injured — these, finally, are the great themes of Yiddish literature” (SBDM, 50). Bellow, like most modern novelists and Jewish writers, does not avoid the theme of alienation, but he insists on the greatness of man through the revelation of his character’s final social or psychological accommodation to society by love, though not permanent.
When he was nines in 1924, the Bellow family moved to Chicago where the sensitive BOY began to imbibe American culture. He often went to the public library to read the novels and poems of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser instead of the Talmud. In 1933, he graduated from Tuley High School and enrolled in the University of Chicago where he was quite unhappy. During these days, Bellow suffered the disease of so many undergraduates that he described in the opening lines of his Nobel Lecture many years later: “I was a very contrary undergraduate more than forty years ago. It was my habit to register for a course and then to do most of my reading in another field of study, so that when I should have been grinding away at ‘Money and Banking’ I was reading the novels of Joseph Conrad “(AS, 316). He felt the dense cultural atmosphere to him suffocating and transferred to Northwestern University in 1935. Here he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1937, graduating with honors in anthropology and sociology, the science of human beings and human society. These subjects certainly affected his novels once he started to write.
From 1938 to 1942, caught up in the depression, Bellow worked for the Work Projects Administration, preparing short biographies of American writers and also taught for four years at a teacher’s college in Chicago. During WWII, he severed in the Merchant Marine and then settled down to a career of writing and teaching at various universities. He has been married five times, which is perhaps the reason that many male characters in his books have troubles with women. Bellow is now a professor at the University of Chicago. He teaches whatever he likes and takes as much time as he needs for his writing.
Bellow lives in a period in which modern writers are interested in literature of despair. To them, modern society is frightful, brutal, hostile, a wasteland and a horror. Their literary works are marked by a shared sense of loss, exile, and alienation. In recent American fictions, there have been the victimized innocent child, the lonely youth, the Negro without identity, the Jew involved in guilt and self-betrayal, the grotesque, the underdog —- all marginal, disaffiliated characters. Especially in Jewish literature. “The virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness, the company of the dispossessed, the sanctity of the insulted and injured — these, finally, are the great themes of Yiddish literature” (SBDM, 50). Bellow, like most modern novelists and Jewish writers, does not avoid the theme of alienation, but he insists on the greatness of man through the revelation of his character’s final social or psychological accommodation to society by love, though not permanent.
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