Canadian-born American novelist — the most intellectually ambitious American fiction writer of the postwar generation and the winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bellow grew up in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant world of Montreal and Chicago, studied anthropology at Northwestern, and after two apprentice novels produced in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) the picaresque book ("I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style") that announced his mature voice: a high-literary English spiked with street idiom and Yiddish cadence, driven by a hungry intelligence working out, in novel after novel, what a modern self could still hope to mean.
Seize the Day (1956) is the tight novella of one terrible day in the life of the failed Tommy Wilhelm. Henderson the Rain King (1959) sends an American millionaire to an invented Africa on a metaphysical quest. Herzog (1964), the masterwork, is the epistolary interior monologue of Moses Herzog, a cuckolded professor writing unsent letters to Heidegger, Nietzsche, Eisenhower, God, and his dead mother — the most sustained engagement with continental existentialism in any American novel. Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), Humboldt's Gift (1975, Pulitzer), and Ravelstein (2000, his last, a roman à clef about his friend Allan Bloom) round out the central shelf.
Bellow's politics moved rightward over his career; his late quarrels with multiculturalism and his friendship with Bloom made him a culture-war figure he had not quite intended to become. The novels before the quarrels are what last.