Author, Saul Bellow, Dies

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".

Bellow’s wife and daughter were at his side at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after the Second World War, among them Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists: William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Philip Roth said.

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.