Agarra o Dia

Nobel Prize in Literature 1976

Saul Bellow, an American writer of Jewish ethnicity, was born on June 10, 1915, in Lachine, near Montreal, Canada. The son of Russian Jews who had immigrated two years before his birth, he lived in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Montreal until 1924, when the family decided to move to Chicago.
His mother died in 1932, but despite the profound grief he suffered, Saul Bellow managed to be admitted to the English Literature course at the University of Chicago. He eventually transferred, however, to... Northwestern University , where he obtained a degree in Anthropology and Sociology in 1937.
He then enrolled in a postgraduate course at the University of Wisconsin, which he soon abandoned, marrying and deciding to become a full-time writer. Obligated to support his new family, he began teaching at the Pestalozzi-Froebel Normal School in Chicago in 1938, where he remained until 1942, at which point he began collaborating with the editorial department of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
In 1944, as part of the United States' entry into World War II, he was assigned to the Merchant Marine. He was not assigned to the Navy due to his Russian ancestry and his sympathies at the time for leftist ideals.
Life aboard ship provided him with the time and disposition necessary to resume writing, and thus, in that same year of 1944, he published his first novel. The Dangling Man The work, partly autobiographical, tells the story of a young man who goes through a crisis upon learning that he will be drafted. In 1947 it was the turn of the second, The Victim.
In 1948 he received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and left for Europe, spending about two years in Paris. There he composed The Adventures of Augie March (1953), which earned him the National Book Prize in the year following its publication.
His success as a novelist continued with works such as Seize the Day (1956) and Herzog (1964), a story of the misfortunes of Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual who goes insane and, to survive his suicidal tendencies, writes letters to God and to deceased philosophers. In 1976 he received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for the publication of Humboldt's Gift (1975), a novel in which he describes the trajectory of a successful writer, Charlie Citrine, who lacks talent. In that same year, 1976, he was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He died on April 5, 2005, at his home in Massachusetts, at the age of 89.

Saul Bellow. In Infopédia. Porto: Porto Editora, 2003-2011.