March 5, 2005

Saul Bellow, (June 10, 1915,to April 5, 2005), according to Britannica:

'was a novelist whose characterizations of modern urban man, disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. ....[Though he is described as an "American" writer] Bellow’s parents emigrated in 1913 from Russia to Montreal. When he was nine they moved to Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University (B.S., 1937) and afterward combined writing with a teaching career at various universities, including the University of Minnesota, Princeton University, New York University, ...the University of Chicago, and Boston University.

Bellow won a reputation among a small group of readers with his first two novels, Dangling Man (1944).... and The Victim (1947) ... The Adventures of Augie March (1953) brought wider acclaim and won a National Book Award (1954). It is a picaresque story of a poor Jewish youth from Chicago, his progress—sometimes highly comic—through the world of the 20th century, and his attempts to make sense of it. In this novel Bellow employed for the first time a loose, breezy style in conscious revolt against the preoccupation of writers of that time with perfection of form.
....
In his later novels and novellas—Herzog (1964; National Book Award, 1965), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970; National Book Award, 1971), Humboldt’s Gift (1975; Pulitzer Prize, 1976),...[among others], Bellow arrived at his most characteristic vein. The heroes of these works are often Jewish intellectuals whose interior monologues range from the sublime to the absurd. At the same time, their surrounding world, peopled by energetic and incorrigible realists, acts as a corrective to their intellectual speculations. It is this combination of cultural sophistication and the wisdom of the streets that constitutes Bellow’s greatest originality...'

Ravelstein (2000) was the last book Saul Bellow published. It got great reviews. Ravelstein is a roman a clef: the character Radu Grielescu, a Jungian professor rumoured to have been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II, is modeled on Mircea Eliade, a Rumanian historian of culture, for one example. Rosamund is a portrayal of Bellow's fifth wife. Bellow describes in the book how Rosamund, "[w]hen she had limped up to the third floor, the cat was there to greet her, or to accuse her of neglect. "

Ravelstein is, perhaps not surprisingly since the author was in his eighties when it was composed, a book about the world of the aged.