The world knew Saul Bellow, who died on Tuesday two months shy of his 90th birthday, as the most distinguished American writer of the second half of the 20th century. I knew him best as a teacher. As a student at the University of Chicago 25 years ago, I was invited to a series of seminars he oversaw alongside Allan Bloom, the political philosopher whom Bellow would immortalise two decades later in his final book, Ravelstein.

Chicago is the most intellectual and bookish of American schools. Bellow and Bloom, who had both been students there, inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air.

Throughout his 56-year career, Bellow sought to elevate the heart above the head, feelings above thoughts, love of man above love of reading. But his books come most alive when they reflect and examine Bellow’s one true love, western culture.

It was that love of western culture and his belief in its superiority that led Bellow to ask the politically incorrect question in a 1988 interview, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” The quote reflected Bellow’s surprising political journey from the left-liberalism of his youth to an interesting brand of conservatism in his later years. His shift first made itself known in his 1970 novel, Mr Sammler’s Planet, which offered a nightmarishly accurate depiction of a crime-ridden, racially menacing New York. It was in part the decay in the civic culture in New York that gave rise at the same time to the intellectual school that came to be known as neoconservatism.

Was Bellow a neoconservative? The question arose in 2000 because of his friendly portrait of a lightly fictionalised Paul Wolfowitz in Ravelstein. (Wolfowitz had been a student and longtime friend of Bloom’s.) The answer is: not really. While the neocons became full-throated American patriots and defenders of capitalism, Bellow retained an aesthetic distaste for American excess.

In 1980, on the eve of the presidential election, Ronald Reagan made a speech that caused Bellow to spend part of his seminar the next day in an impromptu parody of its rhetorical sentimentality. Even then, though, we students all presumed that he had voted for Reagan.

Bellow was then 65, and even at the time was one of the best-looking men on earth — despite a set of sadly neglected teeth.

(In the 1940s a Hollywood talent scout spotted Bellow’s photograph on the back flap of the dust jacket of his second novel, The Victim, and offered him a screen test.) He was neat, precise, slight and thin. He would speak for three or four minutes and when he had finished, you realised that what he had just done was spontaneously speak a beautifully written essay.

Sitting next to me in class was a graduate student a few years older than me, a woman who took meticulous notes. Janis Freedman began working part-time as Bellow’s secretary and, several years after I graduated, they stunned everyone who knew them by getting married.

He was more than four decades older than her, and you only need read the vicious portraits of his former wives in his novels to see how unsuccessful he had been at marriage.

But this unconventional union was the one that finally worked. In his final book Bellow paints a blissful portrait of his marriage to Janis, who gave birth to his only daughter five years ago.

It turned out that, like the protagonist of Mr Sammler’s Planet, Bellow had to wait until his seventies until he could find the love and meaning in his own life that had so long eluded him. It seems that Saul Bellow was finally able, as Mr Sammler says in the book’s last line, to fulfil the terms of his contract with God — “the terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know”.