Saul Bellow was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who grew up speaking Yiddish in Chicago and muscled his way into the center of American literature through sheer verbal force. He won the Nobel Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer, and did it while writing novels that sounded like no one else — fast, funny, intellectually restless, and unapologetically brainy.

This episode traces Bellow from his immigrant childhood through The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and the combative literary career that made him the dominant American novelist of the postwar era.

• He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, the only American-born novelist to win it since Steinbeck
• The Adventures of Augie March opened with a voice so distinctive it redefined what American prose could sound like
• He won three National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift
• He taught at the University of Chicago for decades while remaining one of the most commercially successful literary novelists in America