A-Brief-Introduction-of-Saul-Bellow2.doc

A Brief Introduction of Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times, and the only writer to have been nominated for it six times.
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellow in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia.A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, the city that was to for m the backdrop of many of his novels. Bellow's lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University. In 1941 Bellow became a naturalized US citizen.From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, living on Commonwealth Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
His recurrent themes are displacement, alienation, mascochism, and modern urban man’ssearch for meaningful identity( as in looking for Mr. Green). Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a "Jewish writer." Bellow's work also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.
The author's works speak to the disorienting nature of modern civilization, and the countervailing ability of humans to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness (or at least awareness). Bellow saw many flaws in modern civilization, and its ability to foster madness, materialism and misleading knowledge. Principal characters in Bellow's fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.
His frequent criticism of modern American life is both bitter and loving. His sense of irony is polished which strengthens the force in narration. He is well known for his wide range of interest, for his flexibility and diversity of style and idiom.
Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust and Henry James, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes. Bellow interspersed autobiographical elements into his fiction, and many of his principal characters were said to bear a resemblance to him.
His fiction is dominated by the marginal man, the alienated and absurd characters caught between his own inadequacies and those imposed on him by his friends and the society. In a sense, the alienated man is his favorite protagonist. He often confines his sight to the inner vision of the protagonist.
Therefore, Bellow’s protagonists are often uncommon thinkers who long for transcendental existence as they are estranged from the world around them. But Bellow is by no means pessimistic because he believes in the possibilities of reason. Even if a man can not shape his own destiny, he can still control the manner in which he faces it and then denies absurdity by his oen efforts. So his fiction is affirmatively humanistic with his great faith in man.
His factional world is often chaotic and absurd, but he believes that a novelist begins with disorder and disharmony and gets toward order by an unknown process of the imagination.

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