(born 1915) Jewish American writer based at the University of Chicago, Bellow is considered a path-breaker for a number of other Jewish writers, such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. His first novel, Dangling Man was published in 1944, but his best-known works were written in the following three decades—Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964) and Humboddt’s Gift (1975), which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. These works explore themes of alienation and the modern predicament, the place of Jewish spiritual understanding in cities that seem to have lost their bearings and his own role and responsibility as a Jewish writer.