Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada, in 1915, the youngest of four children, to Russian immigrant parents. He and his family later moved to the Rachel Market section of Montreal and then to Chicago. The feelings of dislocation he would experience in his youth emerged as a dominant theme in Herzog and in many of his other works. Another theme that would surface in his works was a questioning of religion. Bellow was raised as an orthodox Jew but rejected that background during his college years. In 1937, he earned a degree with honors in anthropology and sociology from Northwestern University. During World War II, he served in the merchant Marines. His first novel, Dangling Man, was critically acclaimed when it was published in 1944, as was his next novel, The Victim, which was published in 1947.

After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, Bellow lived in Europe for...