1. --A Brief Introduction to Saul Bellow and His writing

2. About His Life Saul Bellow (1915-2005) American author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, one of the major representatives of Jewish-American writers. Bellow’s works influenced widely American literature after World War II. He was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago ， and died on April 5, 2005, at his home in Brookline, Mass.

3. Works & Honors Novels Novels Dangling Man 1944 The Victim 1947 The Adventures of Augie March 1953 Seize The Day 1956 Henderson The Rain King 1959 Herzog 1964 Mr. Sammler's Planet 1969 Humboldt's Gift 1975 The Dean’s December 1983 A Theft 1989 The Bellarosa Connection 1989 The Actual 1997 Ravelstein 2000

4. non-fiction work non-fiction work Collections To Jerusalem and Back (a personal and literary record of his sojourn in Israel during several months in 1975) 1976 Him With His Foot In His Mouth (short story collection) 1984 It All Adds Up (a collection of memoirs and essays ) 1994 Under the Weather (three short plays) Plays The Wrecker (tv play) 1964 The Last Analysis (play) 1965 Only a brief list here, more works on the internet http://www.saulbellow.org/

5. Honors the National Book Award for fiction thrice the Pulitzer Prize the International Literary Prize (the first American to receive the prize ) (for Herzog) 1965 the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (the highest literary distinction awarded by the Republic of France to non-citizens ) 1968 the B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award for "excellence in Jewish literature" 1968 the America's Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (the first time this award has been made to a literary personage) 1976 the Nobel Prize for Literature "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work." 1976

6. Familial Background Bellow's parents emigrated in 1913 from Russia to Canada. In St. Petersburg Bellow's father, Abraham, imported Turkish figs and Egyptian onions. Bellow was raised until the age of nine in an impoverished, polyglot section of Montreal, full of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, and Italians. After his father was beaten - he was also a bootlegger - the family moved to Chicago in 1924. Bellow's mother, Lescha, was very religious and Bellow himself had learned Hebrew and Yiddish as a young man. Liza's death when he was 17, was a deep emotional shock for him. "My life was never the same after my mother died," Bellow said. Marriages: Bellow married five times, had three sons from his first four marriages. In 1989 he married Janis Freedman. They had one daughter, Naomi, born in 1999. Although Bellow is not considered an autobiographical writer, his Canadian birth is dealt with in his first novel, DANGLING MAN (1944), and his Jewish heritage and his several divorces are shared by many of his characters.

7. Saul Bellow & the Universities He attended the University of Chicago, received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. He abandoned his postgraduate studies at Wisconsin University to become a writer. At Wisconsin Dr. Goldenweiser assured Bellow that he his writing had too much style for standard scientific papers. It took years before Bellow published his first book. He taught at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers' College, Chicago, from 1938 to 1942, and worked then for the editorial department of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1943 to 1944. After the outbreak of WWII, he was first rejected by the Army because of a hernia, but in 1944-45 Bellow served in the US Merchant Marine. After the war Bellow returned to teaching, holding various posts at the Universities of Minnesota, New York, Princeton and Puerto Rico, and he is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

8. Main Focus/ Major Concerns "Bellow, too, is convinced that to have a conscience is, after a certain age, to live permanently in an epistemological hell. The reason his and Dostoevsky's heroes are incapable of ever arriving at any closure is that they love their own suffering above everything else. They refuse to exchange their inner torment for the peace of mind that comes with bourgeois propriety or some kind of religious belief. In fact, they see their suffering as perhaps the last outpost of the heroic in our day and age." (Charles Simic in New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001) Among his most famous characters are Augie March, Moses E. Herzog, Arthur Sammler, and Charlie Citrine - a superb gallery of self-doubting, funny, charming, disillusioned, neurotic, and intelligent observers of the modern American way of life.

9. Bellow addresses the question of what it is to be human in an increasingly impersonal and mechanistic world. Writing in a humorous, anecdotal style that combines exalted meditation and modern vernacular, Bellow often depicts introspective individuals who suffer a conflict between old world and new world values while trying to understand their personal anxieties and aspirations. In a period when many writers insist on the impossibility of human communication or heroism. Bellow has been commended for his humanistic celebration of sensitive individuals.

10. His typical protagonist is generally a male, urbanite Jewish intellectual, was described by the Nobel Committee as a man “who keeps trying to find a foothold during his wanderings in our tottering world, one who can never relinguish his faith that the value of life depends on its dignity, not its success.” In developing his characters, Bellow emphasizes dialogue and interior monologue, and his prose style features sudden flashes of wit and philosophical epigrams, their struggle with self and society.

11. Bellow attacked naive Freudianism, THE DEAN'S DECEMBER, MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK, and A THEFT deepened his engagement with the writings of Jung, SEIZE THE DAY used motifs from social anthropology. Bellow proved again his ability to arouse controversy in his 13th novel, Ravelstein. It drew a portrait of Abe Ravelstein, a university professor and a closet homosexual who ultimately dies of AIDS-related illness. Ravelstein's character was based on Allan Bloom, Bellow's colleague at the University of Chicago and the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), who died in 1992. The cause was officially announced as liver failure. Ravelstein's sexual inclinations were only a small detail but critics found it most interesting. This is a problem that writers of fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal minded, and they say, 'Is it true? If it is true, is it factually accurate? If it isn't factually accurate, why isn't it factually accurate?' Then you tie yourself into knots, because writing a novel in some ways resembles writing a biography, but it really isn't. It is full of invention." (Bellow in Time, May 8, 2000) Bellow's attitude to blacks also aroused debate. In an interview (The New Yorker, March 7, 1988) he asked "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" - this time behind the comment was not a fictional character but the writer himself, who wanted to point out that "Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo."

12. About Herzog Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness. ………………