SAUL BELLOW was one of the most respected chroniclers of postwar America. His work combined terse realism with a rarefied intellectual framework drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, as well as the European literary tradition. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Bellow’s novels tended to be populated with almost fatally over-articulate intellectuals, a type of man whose predicament he celebrated. Yet such works as The Adventures of Augie March (1953) — a vigorous and engaging novel, and the first of his “big” books — also conveyed the brash vitality of Bellow’s adopted home, Chicago, a city that he regarded as a microcosm of the best and worst of modern, industrial America.

In later years, from his vantage point as a professor at the University of Chicago, he looked at the city and the rest of the country with an increasingly troubled eye. Dismayed by the rise of the criminal underclass, declining academic standards and what he regarded as the defeatism of the liberal establishment, he expressed his sense of unease in such later novels as The Dean’s December (1982).

The lofty tone of his work had its detractors. Bellow himself once wrote: “European observers sometimes classify me as a hybrid curiosity, neither fully American nor satisfactorily European, stuffed with references to the philosophers, the historians, and poets I had consumed higgedly-piggedly in my Midwestern lair. I am of course, an autodidact, as modern writers always are.” Bellow belonged to the distinguished line of Jewish writers-cum-seers.

Born in Canada, in Lachine, a suburb of Montreal, he was the fourth child of Russian Jews who had left the Tsarist empire in the year before the outbreak of the First World War. The family moved from Canada to Chicago when Bellow was 9. He grew up in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood, and later recalled that his parents spoke Russian to each other, and Yiddish to their children.

His father Abraham sold wood fuel and coal, and is said to have regarded his youngest son’s growing interest in literature with less than wholehearted approval. Bellow’s mother Liza harboured hopes that her child would take the traditional path of becoming a rabbi.

Bellow was by all accounts a precocious reader of the Bible by the time he was 4. His solitary, bookish traits deepened during a long period in hospital after he fell seriously ill at the age of 8; his mother’s early death, in 1924, also left its mark.

He entered the University of Chicago in 1933, transferring to nearby Northwestern University two years later and graduating in 1937 with an honours degree in sociology and anthropology. A voracious reader, he consumed everything from poetry to Lenin’s What is to be Done? His growing interest in writing fiction eventually led him to abandon graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Towards the end of the 1930s he moved to New York, where he lived in Greenwich Village, writing somewhat desultorily at that time, with no real idea of being published. Married by this time to Anita Goshkin (he was eventually to have five wives in all) he took various jobs, before serving in the Merchant Marine in 1944-45.

The year 1944 saw the publication of his first novel, Dangling Man, an account of a university graduate caught in limbo while waiting to be drafted into the forces. Joseph, the protagonist (he has no surname and recalls Kafka’s Joseph K) is the archetype of the passive, resigned, hypersensitive character that was to become Bellow’s trademark. The Victim, a taut study of the relationship between a New York Jew, Asa Leventhal , and his Gentile antagonist, Kirby Allbee, followed in 1947, by which time Bellow was teaching English at the University of Minnesota.

In 1953 his initial promise was fulfilled in The Adventures of Augie March, his exuberant tale of a modern-day, Jewish Huck Finn making his way in the Windy City: “I am an American, Chicago-born — Chicago, that sombre city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style.”

Bellow had begun work on Augie March during a sojourn in Europe at the end of the 1940s. For this Paris had served as his main base. He revelled in the city’s aura of sophistication, though he noted that it did have its drawbacks: “The pervasiveness of literary culture in Paris was not always pleasant. I had to submit when my dentist carried on about a dull play of Camus.”

With his reputation established, Bellow continued to combine writing with academic posts. He returned to Chicago University, joining the Committee on Social Thought. His next book, Seize the Day, was published in 1956. Three years later came Henderson the Rain King, the story of a millionaire whose restless search for spiritual fulfilment takes him to Africa.

Published in 1964, Herzog turned into an unlikely bestseller. It is the most satisfying and substantial of his long novels. Mired in depression and despair, its protagonist, the newly divorced academic Moses Herzog — author of Romanticism and Christianity — fires off rambling letters to friends, distant acquaintances, Nietzsche and God. All his learning and culture are no help in the face of the realisation that he has been cuckolded by his best friend.