One of the world’s greatest writers, Saul Bellow, has died at the age of 89. As this Associated Press story in the San Francisco Chronicledescribes him, the Nobel laureate was “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.”

And the New York Times’ s
Mel Gussow and Charles McGrath describe him as a “self-proclaimed
historian of society” whose fictional heroes and “scathing, unrelenting
and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning – gave new
immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century.”