It’s the birthday of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, Saul Bellow (1915-2005), who in 1976 won the Nobel Prize for Literature and who on his deathbed asked, “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” (Spoiler alert: he was a jerk.) His novels, often set in post-WWII Chicago, were electric, energetic, brash, and darkly comic, filled with oversized characters and big huge ideas.

Bellow was born near Montreal, Canada; his parents were immigrants who had been prosperous Russian Jews back in Saint Petersburg and lost everything. When Bellow, the youngest of four, was nine, the family moved to Chicago, which city became central to Bellow’s life and his writing. He studied at the University of Chicago and then Northwestern, graduating in 1937 with a degree in anthropology and sociology.

Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), was about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted; Bellow himself couldn’t get into the army due to a hernia and was in training with the merchant marine when Hiroshima was bombed. (I hate that, when you’re trying so hard to go to war and then the war ends and you didn’t get to do anything interesting.) He started teaching at the University of Minnesota (woot-woot!), wrote his second novel, The Victim (1947), about anti-Semitism, and in 1948 won a Guggenheim (Fellowship, not Museum) and moved to Paris to write his third novel, the Adventures of Augie March (1953), which officially established him as a Great Big Noise in the literary world.

Bellow went on to write nearly a dozen more novels (including, notably, Herzog, 1964, which won the National Book Award, and Humboldt’s Gift, 1975, which won the Pulitzer), to marry five different women (including, notably, two Alexandras), to have countless affairs and girlfriends, and to be a terrible father to three sons and a daughter. Basically, when Herzog hit No. 1 on the bestseller list, Bellow gave right in to the temptation to become, in the words of one reviewer of The Life of Saul Bellow (Zachary Leader, 2018), “an insufferable, spoiled monster.” (FYI: this bio comes in two volumes and is supposed to be superb.)

Have a fine and peaceful Monday, bolstered by the knowledge that while you may be less famous than a Nobel Laureate (I’m just guessing here), you are also less of an insufferable, spoiled monster (again, just guessing), and do stay ever scrupulously honest to the data.