With an awareness of death and the miracle of life at the foundation of his work, Saul Bellow's novels brought him success and the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes.
Many of his novels were set in Chicago where his Russian-Jewish parents moved when he was a child, "I saw mayhem all around me. By the age of eight, I knew what sickness and death were." His formative years were steeped in his Jewish heritage, but he turned from this "suffocating orthodoxy" to enjoy the works of such writers as Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. From 1944 and the publication of Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, he produced...