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Born to parents who emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1913, Bellow, the fourth and youngest child, grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal and learned to speak both Yiddish and English. In 1924 he moved with his family to Chicago, the city that would influence much of his early fiction. He attended the University of Chicago and then transferred to Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1937 with a degree in anthropology and sociology. He then moved to New York. His plan was to begin graduate work at New York University, but he married instead and eventually moved back to Chicago in 1962. Chicago became the setting for many of his novels of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1993 he accepted a position in the English department at Boston University. Early in his career, Bellow cultivated a friendship with fellow writer Ralph Ellison-an often-forgotten point in the controversy surrounding his much-debated stance on Jewish-African American relations and the attacks he endured for the supposed racism of such novels as Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970).
Bellow wrote his first book, Dangling Man (1944), while serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II and followed it with The Victim in 1947. In 1976 his novel Humboldt’s Gift won the Pulitzer Prize. His analysis of American cultural anxiety and his belief in the possibility of greatness in spite of human frailty and failure are at the core of much of his work. Bellow’s prolific output includes the frequently anthologized novella Seize the Day (1956), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), The Dean’s December (1982), and Ravelstein (2000). He has also written plays and short stories.
[3046] Lewis Hine, Old Jewish Couple, Lower East Side (1910),
courtesy of George Eastman House.
Upon arrival in the United States, Eastern European Jewish immigrants found themselves faced with difficult questions: which aspects of their ethnic identity should they preserve and which should they reshape? Writers like Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska asked these questions in the early twentieth century, from the perspective of the Lower East Side; later writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth reflected on the transformation of Jewish identity in the United States.
[3048] Anonymous, Free Classes in English! Learn to Speak, Read, & Write the Language of your Children … Special Classes for Educated Foreign Born. N.Y.C. (1936),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC2-946].
Sign in Hebrew and English advertising free English-language and naturalization classes aimed at European Jewish immigrants. The classes were offered through the Works Progress Administration’s Adult Education Program in New York City. Most Jewish immigrants in New York and other major cities lived in tight-knit communities where Hebrew or Yiddish was spoken.
[6248] Anonymous, Ginsberg with Classmates, the Columbia Campus Quadrangle (1948),
courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
Allen Ginsberg had a precarious relationship with Columbia University: as a sophomore, he was expelled for sketching obscene drawings and phrases on his dorm window, which he said he did to demonstrate its dustiness. And although he eventually graduated, Ginsberg’s final years at the school were compli-cated after he allowed an addict friend to store stolen items in his apartment: in order to avoid prosecution, Ginsberg pled insanity and spent eight months at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute.
[9072] U.S. Department of the Interior, Map of Chicago, 1970 [from The National Atlas of the United States of America, U.S. Geological Survey] (1970),
courtesy of the General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
At the age of nine, Saul Bellow moved from the Jewish ghetto of Montreal to Chicago, where he would reside for much of his adult life. Bellow’s “human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture,” in the words of his Nobel Prize citation, reflect in part his witnessing Chicago’s transformation from a stockyard and rail town to a booming metropolis of business and industry.