Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow — writer (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, near Montreal, on 10 June 1915, the youngest of four children of Abraham Bellows, born Belo, and Lescha, or Liza, née Gordin. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated from Saint Petersburg, in the Russian Empire, two years before his birth; his elder siblings Zelda, Moishe and Schmuel had been born before the emigration.

In Saint Petersburg the family had been prosperous and cosmopolitan; Abraham had become an onion importer, and the surname, spelled Belo, is said to derive from the Russian word for white. His father's birthplace is given as Druya, a town in the Pale of Settlement, though one version names Vilnius. In Canada the family's fortunes fell: Abraham tried a bakery, a group of shops and making sacks for the Canadian government during the First World War. In Lachine, which Bellow later remembered as almost a medieval ghetto, he learned Yiddish, Hebrew, French and English. His mother, who was deeply religious, hoped he would become a rabbi or a concert violinist; she died when he was fifteen. The family later moved to Chicago.

Bellow entered the University of Chicago in 1933 and graduated from Northwestern University in sociology and anthropology. His first novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), were followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 that took him to Paris, where he wrote much of The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Its loose, colloquial style made his name, and it won the National Book Award. He later won the award again for Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the first novelist to win it three times. Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Seize the Day were also among his best-known books.

Humboldt's Gift (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 1976 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture combined in his work. He taught at Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, Chicago and Boston University, wrote an account of a long stay in Israel, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), and published his last novel, Ravelstein, in 2000. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1988.

He died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on 5 April 2005, aged eighty-nine.

Tracing the roots — Saint Petersburg (Russia)

Born Solomon Bellows on 10 June 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, to Abraham Bellows (né Belo) and Lescha (née Gordin), Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire. His father was born in Druya, in the Pale of Settlement. He grew up in Montreal and Chicago.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Saint Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition