Saul Bellow

Born Solomon Bellows in Quebec in 1915, Bellow grew up an immigrant wrestling with what one critic called the drive to "overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." That tension - between the weight of the world and the hunger for something higher - became the engine of his fiction. The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, Henderson the Rain King: each handed a protagonist the same assignment, to fight through the "unutterably dismal" toward something like transcendence, usually through a ferocious assimilation of learning and an insistence on nobility. The Swedish Nobel Committee, awarding him the prize in 1976, praised his mix of picaresque richness and cultural analysis, his ability to entertain and philosophize in the same breath. He once said Eugene Henderson, the rain king, was the character most like himself. Bellow died in 2005, the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times.