Thursday, 28 April 2022 - 00:00
Assaf Galay (2021)
Documentary, 85 min, USA/Israel
PARTNERSHIP WITH
BLUE METROPOLIS INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL
V.O. English
The film traces Bellow’s rise to eminence and examines his many identities: reluctant public intellectual, ‘serial husband’, father, Chicagoan, Jew and American. Interviews with the novelist’s family and friends will shed new light on Bellow’s personality and the way he turned life into art.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Lachine (Quebec) in 1915, son of Jewish-Russian immigrants, raised in street school but a career university (notably in Chicago), Saul Bellow won three times the National Book Award, for The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964) and The Planet by Mr. Sammler (1969). Dedicated “best American writer of his generation”, in front of Norman Mailer, the Nobel glorified him in 1976. This artist who mixes slang with Jewish metaphysics, five times divorced, lived between Vermont and Boston, remarried to an ex-student thirty years his junior, when he died in 2005.
AWARDS and HONORS
- 1948: Guggenheim Fellowship
- 1954: National Book Award for Fiction
- 1965: National Book Award for Fiction
- 1971: National Book Award for Fiction
- 1976: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
- 1976: Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1980: O. Henry Award
- 1986: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
- 1988: National Medal of Arts
- 1989: PEN/Malamud Award
- 1989: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
- 1990: National Book Foundation’s lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
- 1997: National Jewish Book Award for The Actual
- 2010: Inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels and novellas
- – Dangling Man (1944)
- – The Victim (1947)
- – The Adventures of Augie March (1953), National Book Award for Fiction
- – Seize the Day (1956)
- – Henderson the Rain King (1959)
- – Herzog (1964), National Book Award
- – Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), National Book Award
- – Humboldt’s Gift (1975), winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
- – The Dean’s December (1982)
- – More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
- – A Theft (1989)
- – The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
- – The Actual (1997)
- – Ravelstein (2000)
Non-fiction
- – To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
- – It All Adds Up (1994)
- – Saul Bellow: Letters (2010)
- – There Is Simply Too Much To Think About (2015)