Bellow syntyi Solomon Bellowina 10. kesä- tai heinäkuuta 1915 Lachinessa, Quebecissä (lähellä Montrealia), venäjänjuutalaiseen perheeseen mutta eli suurimman osan elämästään Chicagossa. Hän opiskeli (antropologiaa ja sosiologiaa) Chicagon ja Northwestern yliopistoissa ja valmistui Wisconsinin yliopistosta. Hän oli ehkä merkittävin pohjoisamerikkalainen kirjailija (ja kirjailijana merkittävämpi kuin yksikään paavi). Elämänsä aikana hänelle myönnettiin Nobelin kirjallisuuden palkinto, Pulitzer-palkinto ja kolmasti "National Book Award". Bellow'n tuotantoa on julkaissut suomeksi Tammi (Keltaisessa kirjastossa).
Annan parempieni luonnehtia Mestaria ja hänen työtään:
Reuters kirjoitti:His work touched on the essence of human existence, the experience of immigrants and Jews, and class and social mobility in 20th century America.
In an interview with Reuters in 1998, Bellow said: "There are only a few wonderful writers around, and then there's the field, as they say in horse racing."
He cited Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Denis Johnson as contemporary writers he liked, but slammed Tom Wolfe as a "very gifted journalist," but not much of a novelist.
Asked about his thoughts on what happens after death, Bellow offered two scenarios: oblivion or immortality.
The Associated Press kirjoitti:Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in "Herzog", "Humboldt's Gift" and other novels both championed and mourned the soul's fate in the modern world, died Tuesday.
Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant's hustle, the bookworm's brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.
"The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists -- William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Philip Roth said in a statement Tuesday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." (AP)
Mel Gussow & Charles McGrath, New York Times kirjoitti:The center of his fictional universe was Chicago, where he grew up and spent most of his life, and which he made into the first city of American letters. Many of his works are set there, and almost all of them have a Midwestern earthiness and brashness. Like their creator, Mr. Bellow's heroes were all head and all body both. They tended to be dreamers, questers or bookish intellectuals, but they lived in a lovingly depicted world of cranks, con men, fast-talking salesmen and wheeler-dealers.
All his work, long and short, was written in a distinctive, immediately recognizable style that blended high and low, colloquial and mandarin, wisecrack and aphorism.
Mr. Bellow stuck to an individualistic path, and steered clear of cliques, fads and schools of writing. He was frequently lumped together with Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud as a Jewish-American writer, but he rejected the label, saying he had no wish to be part of the "Hart, Schaffner & Marx" of American letters. In his younger days, he was loosely allied with the liberal and arty Partisan Review crowd, led by Philip Rahv and William Phillips, but he eventually broke with them saying, "They want to cook their meals over Pater's hard gemlike flame and light their cigarettes at it." He spoke his own mind, without regard for political correctness or fashion, and was often involved, at least at a literary distance, in fierce debates with feminists, black writers, postmodernists.
While others were ready to proclaim the death of the novel, he continued to think of it as a vital form. "I never tire of reading the master novelists," he said. "Can anything as vivid as the characters in their books be dead?"
