Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born American writer celebrated for his profound contributions to literature. He was awarded numerous prestigious honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. Remarkably, he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times and received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, Bellow's writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age."

His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift, and Ravelstein. Bellow once remarked that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, from Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself.

Bellow's upbringing as an immigrant from Quebec and his subsequent life in the United States deeply influenced his writing. His fiction and primary characters reflect a yearning for transcendence, battling "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." As Christopher Hitchens describes, Bellow's protagonists confront what Albert Corde, the dean in The Dean's December, referred to as "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal," a phrase from Dangling Man, is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" and an emphasis on nobility.