Saul Bellow (1915–2005)

Saul Bellow was born in the Montreal suburb of Lachine to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants who moved to Chicago when he was nine. He grew up between two worlds: the Yiddish domestic world of his family and the vast, brash, vernacular culture of mid-century American cities.

His novels are full of men who are too intelligent for their own happiness. They know too much, feel too much, and cannot stop analysing their own feelings long enough to act well. Herzog writes letter after letter he never sends. Henderson drums the world with his enormous need. These characters are incorruptible only in their capacity to see their own failures with merciless clarity.

Bellow understood that the American intellectual comedy — the immigrant who mastered the culture and then found the culture insufficient — was one of the defining stories of the twentieth century. He told it with density, speed, and the rhythms of a mind that never stopped working.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1976. The committee cited his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture."

His Nobel Lecture (1976) begins with a confession: as a "very contrary undergraduate" he skipped Money and Banking to read Joseph Conrad. He never regretted it. Read it at NobelPrize.org.