The 34^th stamp in the Literary Arts series honored Saul Bellow, widely regarded as one of the greatest authors of the 20^th century. He is the only person to have won the National Book Award for fiction three times. He received many literary accolades before his death in 2005, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in literature.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada, in 1915, he moved with his family to Chicago in 1925, becoming part of the city’s vibrant immigrant Jewish community. An avid writer since childhood, Bellow graduated from Northwestern University in 1937 with degrees in anthropology and sociology and moved to Wisconsin to study further. However, he soon dropped out of college to focus on writing. 

His first writing job was in Chicago with the Works Progress Administration, where he was assigned to write biographies of Midwestern authors. Bellow began an unfinished novel in 1939, then in 1941, published his first short story, “Two Morning Monologues,” in Partisan Review. Two years later, he became a U.S. citizen.

Bellow considered his first two novels, “Dangling Man” (1944) and “The Victim” (1947), as his apprentice work. His third novel, “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953), reached a wider audience and garnered a National Book Award. Set in Chicago, the story follows the progress of a poor Jewish youth as he tries to make sense of the modern world. Unlike the more controlled and conventionally literary style of his first two novels, “Augie March” is written in a freewheeling comic vernacular, mixing high and low culture, that is exemplified in the book’s famous opening line: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

Bellow would be associated with this style, which many regarded as groundbreaking, throughout his career. He would also be associated with Jewish identity, but although many of his characters were Jewish, he did not like being referred to as a “Jewish writer.” With his subtle analysis of modern culture and the immigrant experience, he considered himself a historian of the American identity. Many of his main characters were based on friends and family and indeed on himself and events in his own life. His novels feature bookish intellectuals and dreamers in search of meaning in a materialistic, sometimes disorienting world, which Bellow renders with comic gusto as well as fierce criticism.