Saul Bellow

Introduction

Saul Bellow

“Fiction is the higher autobiography,” Saul Bellow once said. And true to his words, Bellow infused his work with incidents and characters from his own life and beloved hometown of Chicago. It was a method that worked well: he has garnered more awards for his writing than any other American author, including the Nobel Prize in literature, three Pulitzer Prizes, and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In addition to using personal experience in his writing, shown to particularly good effect in his much-loved breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow considered himself to be a “historian of society,” and his anthropological approach is apparent in critical and popular successes such as Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet.

Essential Facts

1. Although considered a through-and-through American, Bellow was not actually a native son. He was born in Quebec and didn’t move to the States until he was 9 years old.
2. Bellow’s mother wanted him to be either a rabbi or a concert violinist. However, during a hospitalization at age eight, Bellow fell in love with literature and committed to that path for the rest of his life.
3. One of his closest friends was the writer Ralph Ellison.
4. He once said that the character Eugene Henderson (from Henderson the Rain King), a pig farmer and violinist, was the most like himself.
5. As to his craft, Bellow claimed, “The writer’s art appears to seek compensation for the hopelessness or meanness of existence.”