Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow born Solomon Bellows 10 June 1915 5 April 2005 was a Canadianborn American writer For his literary work Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the Nobel Prize for Literature and the National Medal of Arts He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundations lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990 In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee his writing exhibited the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture of entertaining adventure drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act or prevent us from acting and that can be called the dilemma of our age His bestknown works include The Adventures of Augie March Henderson the Rain King Herzog Mr Sammlers Planet Seize the Day Humboldts Gift and Ravelstein Bellow was regarded as an important author of 20th century American literature Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson of Henderson the Rain King was the one most like himself Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec As Christopher Hitchens describes it Bellows fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence a battle to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses Bellows protagonists in one shape or another all wrestle with what Albert Corde the dean in The Deans December called the bigscale insanities of the 20th century This transcendence of the unutterably dismal a phrase from Dangling Man is achieved if it can be achieved at all through a ferocious assimilation of learning Hitchens and an emphasis on nobility From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia