Saul Bellow

Canadian-American writer Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec on June 10, 1915. 

He was born two years after his parents, Lescha (née Gordin) and Abraham Bellows, emigrated  to Canada from Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Saul Bellow Flick

Saul Bellow's mother wanted him to become a rabbi or a violinist, but he decided to become a writer aged eight when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

As a young man, Bellow went to Mexico City to meet Leon Trotsky, but the expatriate Russian revolutionary was assassinated the day before they were to meet.

Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), deals with the anxiety and discomfort of a young man waiting to be drafted in wartime. 

In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writing his best-known novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953). A long, loosely structured narrative with a picaresque hero, it gives a vivid, often humorous picture of Jewish life in Chicago and of a young man’s search for identity. 

Bellow received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975); three months later he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in literature. He was also awarded France’s Legion d’honneur.

Bellow is the first and to date only writer to win three National Book Awards (U.S.), for his novels The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Herzog (1965), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1971).

He was married five times and his fourth child and first daughter with his last wife Jane Bellow. Naomi Rose, was born when he was 84 years old. Janis, was in her early 40s.

Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself.

Source Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia