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  • 标题:Saul Bellow, the great outsider, dies aged 89
  • 作者:DANIEL JOHNSON
  • 期刊名称:London Evening Standard
  • 印刷版ISSN:2041-4404
  • 出版年度:2005
  • 卷号:Apr 6, 2005
  • 出版社:Associated Newspaper Ltd.

Saul Bellow, the great outsider, dies aged 89

DANIEL JOHNSON

NOBEL prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow has died aged 89.

Friend and lawyer Walter Pozen said Bellow died yesterday of natural causes at his home in Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter at his side.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and three US National Book Awards, Bellow rose from writing book reviews for $10 apiece to become one of the greatest novelists in the English language, with works such as The Adventures Of Augie March, Herzog, and Henderson The Rain King.

Although he was one of the finest novelists, he was also the most politically incorrect. He relished controversy and did not suffer fools gladly - especially those who attempted to toadie to him.

Even before the 1953 publication of Augie March, Bellow had high ambitions.

When a friend who read the manuscript told him it would change the American novel, he replied: "Not the American novel.

The American language."

The book was a popular success-but he soon found himself up against the American literary establishment.

In novels such as Humboldt's Gift - which saw him win the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes in 1975 - Herzog, Henderson The Rain King and Mr Sammler's Planet, Bellow encompassed the experience of life in mid-20th century America.

His prose achieved a depth and breadth, passion and subtle irony that placed him in a league of his own.

Born in 1915 in Canada to Russian immigrants, the young Bellow moved with his family to Chicago. His mother wanted him to be a Talmudic scholar but he always wanted to be a writer.

During the war he served in the US merchant navy. Proud of his Jewishness - he saw himself in the tradition of Yiddish storytellers - he still admitted he could not fathom the depth of evil revealed in the Holocaust: "I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note." He always considered himself "some sort of liberal" but in later years became close to neo-conservative academics at the University of Chicago, who subsequently shaped the Bush administration's politics.

Enjoying a cameo role in his book Ravelstein is Paul Wolfowitz, later one of the architects of the Iraq war and now president of the World Bank. It was a move that further antagonised liberal opinion.

In public appearances, Bellow denounced political correctness as "a serious threat to political health" and was himself attacked for criticising anti-Semitism among black Americans. His depictions of women in his novels were castigated by feminists as sexist.

Bellow's five marriages brought him four children. His fifth wife, Janis Freedman, gave birth to daughter Naomi Rose in 1999, when Bellow was 84.

By the end of his life, Bellow was an isolated figure, living in his New England redoubt, rejected by the literary establishment. He was content to be an outsider.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

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