Quitting his graduate studies at Wisconsin after several months, he participated in the WPA Writers' Project in Chicago, preparing biographies of Midwestern novelists, and later joined the editorial department of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He came to New York "toward the end of the '30s, muddled in the head but keen to educate myself." He tried to write fiction, aimlessly and with little success at first. He later joined the merchant marine and, during his service, he completed Dangling Man, about the alienation of a young Chicagoan waiting to be drafted. It was published in 1944, before the author was 30, and was followed by The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism that he said, was influenced by Dostoyevsky.
In 1948, financed by a Guggenheim fellowship, Bellow went to Paris.
His first major novel, The Adventures of Augie March, was published in 1953, and it became Bellow's breakthrough, his first best seller and the book that established him as a writer of consequence.
The beginning of the novel was as striking and as unforgettable as the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, and it announced a brand-new voice in American fiction, jazzy, brash, exuberant, with accents that were both Yiddish and Whitmanian.
"I am an American, Chicago born -- Chicago, that somber city -- and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so
innocent."
In addition to his wife Janis, he is survived by three sons, Gregory, Adam and Daniel; a daughter, Naomi Rose; and six grandchildren.
RSS