A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 1

Saul Bellow (1915—2005) is one of the most prolific and energetic writers in the contemporary literary world. Be is not simply a novelist, hut an essayist, a short-story writer, a playwright, a translator and an editor. Throughout his forty-year’s writing career he has published a dozen novels and novelette, dozens of short stories, hundreds of essays, articles and translations, a full-length play, and a biography. Nobel laureate and winner of numerous prestigious fiction awards, Bellow has commanded series attention from a large range of reviews and critics at home and abroad for more than forty years. By now he is possibly the most written about novelist of the contemporary American period.

As a novelist, Saul Bellow considers it his duty to attempt to work out solutions to distraction and cope with confusion of facts, idea and emotion of everyday life. As an essayist, he shows his concern for human integrity and explores the problem of human identity assailed by physical, psychological and intellectual distractions in a selfish materialistic.

PROFILE OF SAUL BELLOW

SAUL BELLOW, who died on 5 April 2005, at the age of eighty-nine, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, and received the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the National Medal of Arts. No American writer has garnered more honors.

He was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, on 10 June or perhaps in July 1915, the former date, however, being the one on which Mr. Bellow usually celebrated his birthday. His family-the parents and three older children-had emigrated from Russia to Canada only two years earlier. In 1924 the Bellows moved to Chicago.

SAUL BELLOW: AN APPRECIATION

It was the fall of 1975. The cover story in that week's Newsweek was about Saul Bellow, "America's Master Novelist." I had to find out who this master novelist was. Humboldt's Gift was Bellow's latest novel, the one being celebrated in that issue. Reading it was one of my first introductions to great literature. Many other experiences would follow, but Bellow, along with Thomas Wolfe, was there first.

Few American writers have enjoyed so much acclaim for such an extensive period of time as Saul Bellow (1915-2005). In his long and productive career, Bellow won a Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and in 1976, the Nobel Prize. The post World War II era was marked by a string of ambitious novelists, all striving to reach the heights scaled by Faulkner and Hemingway. Of that generation, Bellow was the only Nobelist. But the prize was not a "ticket to one's own funeral" (as TS. Eliot dryly observed). Bellow was productive for a good quarter of a century following that honor.