Saul Bellow
'I'd trade the prize for a beautiful house on a tropical island somewhere. Then I could be away from all the people demanding interviews.' - Saul Bellow on winning the Nobel Prize, in a 1989 Boston Globe article.
Life: His Olympian reputation belies his introversion. Saul Bellow keeps his profile as low as that of the loners who people his work. Born Solomon Bellows in 1915, he rose from a Quebec slum called Lachine (named by an ambitious French military officer who, sent to look for China, claimed he had found it). Bellow's illegal alien father imported Egyptian onions and bootlegged for American rum-runners. Home was presumably not a shrine to literature.
The future writer only came under its spell while washed up in hospital for a year during his childhood. At 17, Bellow and a friend, the future newspaper columnist Sydney Harris, ran away to New York City, where they vainly tried to hawk their first novels.
Bellow then resorted to education, entering Chicago's Northwestern University where he studied anthropology, a subject that may have enhanced his gift for characterisation, and he graduated in 1937.
When the war came, Bellow tried to join the Canadian Army but was rejected on medical grounds. This humiliation supplied the inspiration for his first published novel, Dangling Man. Almost every big-time journal and newspaper in the country reviewed Dangling Man, marking the start of a promising career.
Bellow went on to win a slew of honours including three National Book Awards, the 1975 Pulitzer for Humboldt's Gift and the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature.
What drives King Saul has never been worked out. One answer may be his hatred of complacency, which he supposedly sees as the source of mediocrity. But Bellow will never confirm that hunch. Poor Mark Harris, the author of Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck (University of Georgia Press, 1981) found it hard to coax or cajole the recluse into co-operating at all. The book was not a biography but a memoir of how he failed to write one. Unless the critic takes the trite, psychoanalytic route and reads Bellow's masterpiece, Herzog, as a veiled autobiography, the writer remains one of the book world's enigmas.
Work: Dangling Man (Vanguard, 1944); The Victim (Vanguard, 1947); The Adventures Of Augie March (Viking, 1953); Henderson The Rain King (Viking,1959); Herzog (Viking, 1964); Mr Sammler's Planet (Viking, 1970); Humboldt's Gift (Viking, 1975); The Dean (Harper, 1982); More Die Of Heartbreak (Morrow, 1987). Subplot: What happened? Bellow appears to be a victim of the Nobel hoodoo evoked by TS Eliot when he said 'No one has ever done anything after he got it.'
Reading lists for courses in American literature rarely include him. His confessional style may be too self-indulgent. Or it may be that, as a white Jewish male, he is a victim of political correctness - a mindset he lambasted in a 1994 New York Times article: 'We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.'
Embrace the fatalism of Herzog. This classic meditation on 'post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution' is dominated by a twice-divorced professor of Romantic literature, Moses Herzog. Nothing happens, but Herzog has a compellingly agonised stab at dissecting the calamity technically known as his life that he sums up as a rise 'from humble origins to complete disaster'.
'We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists or fascists'
