Saul Bellow Overview

Saul Bellow became one of the twentieth century's great novelists by following the dictum that is repeated to all young fiction writers: Write what you know. Beginning with his first novel, Bellow's voice spoke from the center of his life and... [more]

Saul Bellow became one of the twentieth century's great novelists by following the dictum that is repeated to all young fiction writers: Write what you know. Beginning with his first novel, Bellow's voice spoke from the center of his life and times. "The Dangling Man" (1944) tells the story of a young man in pre-draft limbo, who speaks emotionally and intelligently about his alienation from a spiritually bereft, tough-guy world. The book's subject matter and flowing style declared Bellow's formal rejection of the model of American fiction embodied by Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Bellow is a Realist. But Bellow knows that reality exists only in perception. While he often writes in third-person voice, the point of view of a work is always closely allied with the protagonist's. From Herzog to Auggie March to Mr. Sammler, each character has his most intimate thoughts laid out on the pages. In fact, voice, particularly in monologue form, has always been the most salient characteristic of Bellow's fiction. His protagonists are rhetorical and demonstrative, their internal rants nuanced with high seriousness, low comedy, street slang, lyrical power, and realistic references to the events of their days. In "Herzog" and "Mr. Sammler's Planet"(which both won the National Book Award), Bellow develops intellectual but flawed characters through whose eyes American culture can be scrutinized, lamented, and sometimes lauded. Bellow creates narrators who are smart enough to dig at America's problems, but also troubled enough to be unable to perfectly control their own lives. Critics often hail Bellow for his rich psychoanalytic and sociological content, the results of a scholastic erudition that he gained in college. The Canadian-born author studied both sociology and anthropology at Northwestern University and later at the University of Wisconsin. With the aid of a Guggenheim grant, he left graduate school in order to devote his time to writing. Bellow matured quickly as a novelist, releasing the sophisticated success, "The Adventures of Auggie March," less than a decade after his first novel appeared. His prodigious and monumental output is astounding: he published a major novel almost every five years from the 1940s through the 1960s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976 for an oeuvre that includes "Humbolt's Gift" and "Henderson the Rain King," as well as his other now-classic novels. [show less]