Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born on the 10th of June, 1915 in a part of today’s Montréal, Canada. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Bellow grew up in Chicago and the first language he learned was Hebrew. This led to his lifelong love for the Bible. After his studies he worked as journalist and as professor at several Universities.
In 1944 he published his first book “Dangling Man” and started a great career as a writer. His friend Philip Roth said about him: “The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists – William Faulkner and Saul Bellow“. Bellow won many awards with his works. He was the first novelist who won the National Book Award three times (“The Adventures of Augie March”, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” and “Herzog”). With “Humboldt’s Gift” he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. In the same year he won the Nobel Prize of Literature and 12 years later he got the National Medal of Arts.
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Most of Bellow’s novels tell stories about isolation, spiritual dissociation and the possibilities of human awakening.
Bellow died last year on the 5th of April in Brookline, Massachusetts.