Author Saul Bellow, Disenfranchised and Dangling

Journalism and a cynical eye go together well. Just check out Saul Bellow. Bellow’s own experience as a journalist, and a cynical one at that, can be the doorway for readers and writers to see how one’s background concretely influences their work. If you are interested in this type of writing then you would probably enjoy Humboldt’s Gift, The Adventures of Augie March, and Dangling Man. Probably part of the attraction to his writing stems from my own experience as a journalist, which provides some relationship to his time as a correspondent.

Saul Bellow’s History in Writing

Youth

Saul Bellow was born in a suburb of Montreal, Quebec, known as Lachine on June 10, 1915. He was the son and fourth child or Russian-Jewish immigrants, and his father’s talent “was for failure” (PBS). At the age of nine, his parents moved him to Chicago where he and his family lived without citizenship. He was, according to his father and brother, as the “schmuck with a pen,” as he had hopes for academia rather than the family coal business.

College and Early Writings

Eventually, he attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University and graduated in 1937. Afterward, he attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. During World War II, he served in the Merchant Marines. Similarly, Ralph Ellison also served in the Merchant Marines and wrote about topics in a similar cynical manner.

Bellow wrote Dangling Man in 1944. The novel detailed the life of an aimless man in America during wartime. The novel did very well with critics, which helped put Bellow on the map.

Award-Winning Novelist

Bellow wrote his biggest hit in 1953 with The Adventures of Augie March. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954 for its achievement. In 1964, Bellow wrote Herzog, which explored intellectualism, relationship, and a crisis of the soul.

Perhaps Bellow’s greatest accomplishment was receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976 for his book Humboldt’s Gift (1975), in which he wrote about materialist society in Chicago. In the 1980s, Bellow published many works, from The Dean’s December (1982) to More Die of Heartbreak (1987).

Playwright and Short Story Author

Along with being a novelist, Bellow was also a playwright. He wrote three short plays and The Last Analysis. He also wrote short stories, and his work appeared in Partisan Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Playboy. Likewise, he taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota. Toward the end of his life, he served as a war correspondent for Newsday during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1967.

Bellow died on April 5, 2005.