Nobel Winner Penned Flawed Heroes

Saul Bellow, next to fellow author Susan Cheever, listens during a writers conference in Boston. He moved to Massachusetts in 1993 and worked at Boston University, continuing his long tradition of teaching. (1999 Photo Steven Senne -- AP)

In the early 1950s, Bellow was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, a creative writing fellow at Bard College, then a faculty member at New York University, where he was an associate professor of English from 1954 to 1959. He was a visiting professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, then in 1962 joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he would spend 30 years.

In 1993 he moved east, settled in Brookline and joined the faculty at Boston University, where he taught a seminar on the modern novel. He already had a vacation home in Vermont.

Given his success as an author, he didn't really have to continue teaching, but he did it anyway, mainly for the human contact. Writing, he said more than once, could be a lonely occupation, and sometimes he needed what he liked to call a "humanity bath," which he could get by riding on a subway or sitting in a crowded theater. He preferred teaching because it enabled him to have a conversation about literature while taking his humanity bath, and for more than 50 years he taught regularly in college classrooms.

When he won the Nobel Prize in 1976, Bellow described himself as "just an old-fashioned writer." He was frightened of becoming a celebrity, he said. "There is no literary life I want to live. . . . I don't want to join the jet set. . . . I don't want to be a public figure or go on TV. . . . Being a writer is a rather dreamy thing. . . . One has to protect one's dream space."

He would continue writing, long past an age when most authors cease being productive. In early 2000, his novel "Ravelstein" was published, based on the life of Bellow's friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, the conservative political philosophy professor who wrote the best-selling "Closing of the American Mind." The fictional Ravelstein of Bellow's novel is portrayed as a self-indulgent genius and luxury-loving homosexual who dies of AIDS.

The incorporation of elements from his own life into the novel was consistent with a pattern Bellow had established in his earlier works. A friend, poet Delmore Schwartz, is presumed to have been the basis for "Humboldt's Gift," the story of an intellectual Chicagoan named Charlie Citrine whose mentor, Von Humboldt Fleisher, died unnoticed as a derelict.

Chandler Chapman, a son of writer John Jay Chapman, was said to have been the basis for Eugene Henderson, the rain king of Bellow's 1959 novel. Billy Rose, the Broadway impresario, was the inspiration for the 1989 novella "The Bellarosa Connection."

In his seventh novel, "Mr. Sammler's Planet," Bellow described a Holocaust survivor who had vision in only one eye. With his good eye, he observes the people and events in the world around him; with his blind eye he looks to introspection, analysis, historical and philosophical prospective as he tries to make sense of a planet that seems to have lost its moorings and direction.

Among Mr. Bellow's other works were "The Dean's December" (1982), a story about a journalist turned academic, and "More Die of Heartbreak" (1987), about two academics whose relationships with women and reality are less than direct.

He visited Israel in 1975, which became the stimulus for his first nonfiction book, "To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account."

At age 81 in 1997, he published the novella "The Actual," returning again to a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Chicago where he traced the spiritual and geographic journey of a man who spent his early years in an orphanage because his parents concluded that way of rearing him would be most convenient for them.

He also wrote short stories and a play, "The Last Analysis," which ran for 28 performances in New York in 1964, and he had contributed articles to such publications as Esquire and Commentary magazines and to Partisan Review and Hudson Review. His awards included the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977.

In 1997, Bellow's portrait was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery for inclusion in its permanent collection. "Easily our greatest living novelist," critic Stanley Crouch declared of Bellow at a dinner commemorating the acquisition. A poll of authors and critics by the London Sunday Times also selected Bellow as the greatest living English-language author.

Bellow's first four marriages, to Anita Goshkin in 1937, Alexandra Tschacbasov in 1956, Susan Glassman in 1961 and Romanian-born mathematician Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca in 1974, ended in divorce.

In 1989, at age 74, he married Janis Freedman, a former student of his who was 31. They had a daughter, Naomi Rose, in 1999, when Bellow was 84. He also had three sons, Gregory from his first marriage, Adam from his second marriage and Daniel from his third marriage.

Staff writer Joe Holley contributed to this report.