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LoungeMachine
04-05-2005, 09:48 PM
Saul Bellow dies aged 89

Hillel Italie in New York
Wednesday April 6, 2005
The Guardian

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy whose novels both championed and mourned the soul's fate in the modern world, died yesterday. He was 89.
Bellow's close friend and lawyer, Walter Pozen, said the writer of Herzog and Humboldt's Gift had been in declining health but was "wonderfully sharp to the end". Bellow's wife and daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.




Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after the second world war, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick.
"The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists - William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Roth said yesterday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."

He was the first writer to win the National Book Award three times: in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, in 1965 for Herzog and in 1971 for Mr Sammler's Planet. In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift.

The same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture".

The son of Russian immigrants with Hebrew as his first language, he was born Solomon Bellows in 1915 in Quebec. When he was nine, his family moved to Chicago.

After teaching for many years at the University of Chicago, Bellow stunned both the literary and academic world by leaving the city with which he was so deeply associated. In 1993, he accepted a position at Boston University. He kept writing into his 80s.

He had five wives, three sons and, at age 84, a daughter.