Saul Bellow: 'American writer supreme'

Saul Bellow was born 100 years ago, on 10 June 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, a small town near Montreal. After studying anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago, he served in the navy and published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. At the age of 49, the publication of Herzog in 1964 made him rich and famous. Bellow, who died in Brookline, Massachusetts in 2005, was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer prize, the Formentor prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal for fiction. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1976 and was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French. Here is what writers and critics said about him:

John Updike

"Saul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist."

Philip Roth

"The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists: William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century. Bellow's special appeal is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon."

^{Saul Bellow in 1984 REX FEATURES}

Ian McEwan

"Saul Bellow was a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments."

James Wood, critic

"Saul Bellow is the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century."

• Saul Bellow interview from 1975

Martin Amis

"Bellow's pre-eminence rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches… Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James."

^{Martin Amis, with his daughter Fernanda, and Saul Bellow in 1998 BBC/TELEVISION STILLS}

AS Byatt

"Saul Bellow [was] a philosophical novelist… Herzog, for instance, is a wonderful novel because it thinks about European culture."

Cynthia Ozick, writer

"Bellow's incremental sound - or noise - rejects imitation the way the human immune system will reject foreign tissue. There are no part-Bellows or next-generation Bellows, there are no literary descendants."

Gore Vidal

"I read Saul Bellow with admiration. He never quite pulls off a book for me, but he’s interesting – which is more than you can say for so many of the other Jewish Giants, carving their endless Mount Rushmores out of halvah."

• Gore Vidal's bitter book feuds

^{Saul Bellow in 1969 The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images}

James Atlas, Bellow's biographer

"Even by the standards of our confessional age, Bellow sticks close to the facts in his work; one can reliably trace his career by reading his novels in sequence…. Each book not only contains the essence of the man but captures, however, obliquely, the spirit of its age. What he did was create a new American idiom, what he did was infuse the native American idiom with his own Jewish, Western European inflection. He always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third. But all three were elements of his genius.

Mary Gaitskill

"In the blunt and exquisite little beauty, Something To Remember Me By, for example, we see a typical Bellow narrator: a worldly old man with a sophisticated eye and a wise-ass sense of humour."

• Humboldt's Gift: The Great American novel

Malcolm Bradbury

"Bellow is a humanist, and his attempt to sustain the humanism that has always been associated with the classic seriousness and worth of fiction is one part of his power. But he is also the writer writing of a post-humanist world: the world of survivors, after Auschwitz."

^{When Saul Bellow collected the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, he said matter-of-factly. "The child in me is delighted, the adult in me is sceptical." He took the award, he said, "on an even keel," aware of "the secret humiliation" that "some of the very great writers of the century didn't get it." PHOTO: REUTERS}