American · b. 1915
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-American novelist whose expansive, intellectually exuberant fiction captured the modern Jewish-American mind at full stretch.
Born in Lachine, Quebec in 1915 and raised in Montreal before his family moved to Chicago, Bellow made Chicago his great literary city — as Dickens made London, as Balzac made Paris. He died in 2005 having won the Nobel Prize (1976), the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift, and three National Book Awards — a haul that represents something close to a consensus judgment that he was the dominant American novelist of his era.
His major novels — The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, Humboldt’s Gift — are among the most intellectually alive works in American fiction: long, digressive, crammed with ideas and comedy and grief, narrated by men who cannot stop thinking even when thinking is destroying them. The Adventures of Augie March opens with one of the great first lines in American fiction (“I am an American, Chicago born”) and never really lets up. Herzog, his masterpiece, follows a divorced intellectual writing unsent letters to everyone he knows and many he doesn’t — Nietzsche, Eisenhower, his dead mother — and it is both genuinely very funny and a sustained investigation of how a mind protects itself from reality. Seize the Day, a short novel easy to overlook beside the longer works, is as concentrated and devastating as anything he wrote.
Bellow was a major public intellectual as well as a novelist, and controversial in his later years for views that his admirers found embarrassing and his critics found disqualifying. His influence on Philip Roth, John Updike, and the generation that followed is foundational — Roth’s debt to him is everywhere and explicitly acknowledged.
by Saul Bellow
Augie March grows up poor and Jewish in Depression-era Chicago and refuses to be defined by it. Picaresque, exuberant, and crammed with characters from every class and corner of American life, this is Bellow's most ebullient novel—the one that announced an entirely new way of writing American English.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Moses E. Herzog, a twice-divorced intellectual in a Chicago-adjacent breakdown, writes unsent letters to everyone — living and dead, famous and unknown — trying to make sense of what has happened to him and whether it matters.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Charlie Citrine is a successful Chicago playwright haunted by the memory of Von Humboldt Fleisher, the brilliant, doomed poet who was his mentor. While Humboldt died broke and mad in New York, Charlie faces alimony, a gangster creditor, and a beautiful younger woman—and discovers that Humboldt left him a gift from beyond the grave.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's last novel is a portrait of his friend Allan Bloom (renamed Ravelstein)—a philosopher who wrote a bestseller, spent the money lavishly, and then died of AIDS. Chick, the narrator, is clearly Bellow himself. A meditation on friendship, mortality, and the specific kind of love that can exist between two men whose wives and students cannot entirely share.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Tommy Wilhelm, a middle-aged failure in New York, spends a single catastrophic day facing his estranged father, his failed marriage, his worthless investments, and the fraudulent Dr. Tamkin—a day that ends in one of the most devastating final scenes in American fiction.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Artur Sammler—Polish-Jewish, seventy years old, half-blind from a Nazi massacre he survived by crawling out of a mass grave—moves through 1960s New York observing the chaos of the counterculture with a survivor's cold clarity. A meditation on civilization, death, and what we owe each other.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Saul Bellow
Chicago, 1942. Joseph, waiting to be drafted, keeps a journal for seven months. He has left his job; he cannot do anything else; he hangs in suspension. Bellow's first novel—written under the influence of Dostoevsky and Kafka—is the purest statement of the anxious intellectual that would define his career.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)guide
Saul Bellow's complete bibliography in order — from Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March to Henderson the Rain King and Seize the Day. Best starting points.
guide
Where to start with Saul Bellow — whether to begin with Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, or The Adventures of Augie March. A complete reading guide.
Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.