Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born in Quebec in 1915, and was raised in Montreal and Chicago. He received a trilingual heritage of Yiddish, English, and French. Trained as an anthropologist at Northwestern and Chicago universities, he taught creative writing at Princeton before being appointed to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. There he has made his home, and his most august works stem from that midwestern locus. He has become the great success that all his less popular and less materially successful Yiddish compatriots tried for, yet failed, as suggested by Cynthia Ozick in her remarkable story Envy, Or Yiddish in America, because they lacked a good translator. Bellow does not need any translator; he represents the generation of American-Jews whose secular education was not only as good as their Gentile neighbors, but whose digestion and interpretation of American culture was markedly superior. Armed with this fortress of knowledge, yet familiar with a Yiddish tradition that still resonated in his inner ear, Bellow possessed every gift for success, and every success was realized.

But the one work that perhaps best reveals Bellow's search for understanding his own literary success, and the resultant success (he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976) of Jewish writers during the third quarter of this century, is Humboldt's Gift (1975). Through the character of Von Humboldt Fleisher, Bellow excavates the scarred relationship he shared with the brilliant but self-defeating Delmore Schwartz, his New York literary parent.

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