NEW YORK Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, 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, died today. He was 89.
Bellow s close friend and attorney, Walter Pozen, said the writer had been in declining health, but was wonderfully sharp to the end. Pozen said that Bellow s wife and daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass.
Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant s hustle, the bookworm s brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.
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