Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and other novels mourned the soul’s fate in the modern world, died last night at the age of 89. The Nobel prize-winning author’s close friend Walter Pozen said that he was "wonderfully sharp to the end".
In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, being praised in the official citation for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture". Bellow kept writing into his eighties. His recent works included The Actual, a novella published in 1997, and Ravelstein, a 2000 novel based on the life of his friend, Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind.
At work in Boston, where he taught as a university professor, Bellow ridiculed the politically correct on campus.
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