Saul Bellow in Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

[Jerry Peterson]

No question, Saul Bellow deserves to be in the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Among his credits, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976), the Pulitzer Prize for Literature (1975 for Humboldt’s Gift), three National Book Awards (1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, 1964 for Herzog, 1970 for Mr. Sammler’s Planet), the National Medal of the Arts (1988), and the International Literary Prize (1964 for Herzog – Bellow was the first American to be given this honor).

He was a novelist, playwright, short story writer, literary critic, and he even took a turn as a war correspondent, covering the 1967 Arab-lsraeli war for Newsday.

All that and he taught . . . at Bard College, Princeton, Yale, the University of Minnesota, New York University, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Chicago where he was on staff for 30 years, and Boston University.

Novelist Philip Roth, Bellow’s protege and friend, said of Bellow, “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.”

He ran in strong company. In the Depression years of the 1930s, Bellow worked for the Chicago office of the Works Progress Administration Writer’s Project. With him there were Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. The three would become half of the first class of six writers to be inducted this year into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

One last Bellow story. Until his later years, he was a liberal and, as a young man, a radical sympathetic to communism in Russia. Specifically, Bellow was a booster of Leon Trotsky. In 1940, Bellow went to Mexico to meet the man he admired. They had an appointment for August 22.

But they would not get together.

Soviet secret police agent Ramón Mercader attacked Trotsky with an ice axe on August 20. The next day he died.

Tomorrow: Meet the third of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s inductees – Gwendolyn Brooks