Saul Bellow

By Marina Gerner

“All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it,” Saul Bellow said of his breakthrough novel “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953). Augie is a dreamy idealist with a drifting mind. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he grew up in a poor working-class neighbourhood in Chicago—just like his creator.

Bellow, who died in 2005, has his centenary on June 10th. He is best known for his big books: “Herzog”, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, “Humboldt’s Gift” and “Ravelstein”. But his short stories—“Seize the Day”, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”, “A Theft”—may be even better. The big books are named after his heroes. Unlike Virginia Woolf, he did not believe that character was dead in the modern novel. He created suffering jokers who fall in love, get divorced and take on “the big-scale insanities of the 20th century” (“The Dean’s December”).