… er ist gestern verstorben.
Wen’s interessiert - Artikel anbei, aber leider wieder auf englisch.
Gruss, Isabel
Saul Bellow, author and Nobel winner, dead
From:Reuters
Wednesday, 6th April, 2005
By Greg Frost
BOSTON (Reuters) - Saul Bellow, who rose from writing book reviews for $10 (5.30 pounds) apiece to become one of America’s greatest novelists after World War II, has died, his friend and lawyer Walter Pozen said. He was 89.
Bellow passed away of natural causes on Tuesday at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, surrounded by family, Pozen said.
A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, and three National Book Awards, Bellow was the author of such novels as „The Adventures of Augie March,“ „Herzog,“ and „Henderson the Rain King.“
His work touched on the essence of human existence, the experience of immigrants and Jews, and class and social mobility in 20th century America.
Born in a Montreal suburb on June 10, 1915, to immigrants from St. Petersburg, the young Bellow moved with his family to Chicago, the city with which his work would become most closely associated.
Bellow’s mother wanted her son to be a Talmudic scholar, and he could read Hebrew before he entered kindergarten, but young Bellow always knew he wanted to be a writer.
„From my earliest days I had a conviction that I was here to write certain things and so from the age of 13, I kept working at that,“ he told the Guardian newspaper in 1997.
Bellow’s greatest critical success was 1975’s „Humboldt’s Gift,“ which won him the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes.
Themes of death and mortality run through many of Bellow’s works, and two near-death experiences marked the early and late stages of the author’s life.
The first occurred when Bellow was eight years old and was hospitalized for six months with a respiratory infection. In a ward where other children were dying, Bellow knew at the time he could have been one of them.
In 1995, Bellow ate a toxic fish while vacationing in the Caribbean. Bacteria attacked his nervous system, and he spent five weeks in intensive care. It took the aging author more than a year to recover.
Bellow’s five marriages resulted in four children from four different wives.
Asked by an interviewer in 1997 his thoughts on marriage, Bellow answered: „I learned that the sexual revolution is a very bloody affair, like most revolutions.“
He spent his later years teaching literature at Boston University, although his course-load was limited to one undergraduate class, for one semester, per year. He spent much of his time at his home in rural Vermont.
Bellow could be a cantankerous personality, bemoaning the quality of contemporary literature and the decline of reading in American society.
In an interview with Reuters in 1998, Bellow said: „There are only a few wonderful writers around, and then there’s the field, as they say in horse racing.“
He cited Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Denis Johnson as contemporary writers he liked, but slammed Tom Wolfe as a „very gifted journalist,“ but not much of a novelist.
Asked about his thoughts on what happens after death, Bellow offered two scenarios: oblivion or immortality.
„My intuition is immortality,“ said Bellow, who was ambivalent about whether he believed in God. „No argument can be made for it, but it’s just as likely as oblivion.“
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