His protagonists were at once driven by high-minded ideals and bogged down by the drudgeries of modern life, straddling the many paradoxes of a post-modern world in an effort to define themselves. Saul Bellow, who died last Tuesday at 89, never sat down to write mere plots, mere linear pathways of convenient moments of action. His novels and short stories were intimate portraits of pure characters. He openly disagreed with the notion that the post-modern age had to say farewell to significant literature about real characters and said as much in his notable Nobel Prize lecture in 1976.

His legacy as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, I feel, will have been his stubbornness to not leave the individual behind, to not abandon hope to nihilism and his refusal to embrace the kaleidoscopic mania that post-modern literature has found so fashionable.

Bellow led a career showered with awards and accolades: the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature and three National Book Awards, to name a few. Bellow wrote such novels as “The Adventures of Augie March,” “Herzog,” “Henderson the Rain King” and “Humboldt’s Gift.” Even having received the most prestigious awards for writing in America, you have to admire Bellow’s tenacity. He wrote well into his 80s. He published “Ravelstein” in 2000 and had a daughter when he was 84. Clearly, here was a man who was both blessed and cursed with a need to create, perhaps at the expense of his five wives.

The passing of Bellow tandem to Arthur Miller’s death in February marks the exit of two great American icons of letters; the former was the master of the novel, the latter the master of the modern stage. A sad season indeed.

Bellow was born to Russian immigrants outside Montreal, was raised Jewish and moved with his family to Chicago when he was 9. Chicago was a frequent setting in Bellow’s work, often so lavishly and realistically depicted that many have commented that the city itself became a character in his writing. In true Bellow style, he showed his readers a Chicago that was at once both captivating and crushing. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago until 1993 when he shocked the literary and intellectual community by taking a position at Boston University to teach a first-year course about “young men on the make” in literature.

Bellow’s life was not a wondering and frenzied escapade like that of, say, Ernest Hemingway. Most of his life was spent living and teaching in Chicago. He may never have run with the bulls like Hemingway did, but unlike Hemingway, there was hardly a topic left uncovered in Bellow’s work. He did not need to lead a tumultuous life to bring explosive creativity to his writing. Alan Cheuse, a book critic for National Public Radio, described Bellow’s sentences as “a kind of spicy hot mix of high thought, low diction, the voice of the street, the voice of the brain; puts it all together and shows us how to look at the world, how to talk about the world in a way that we hadn’t seen it and spoken about it before.” That is part of Bellow’s genius; he never thought the vulgar and laughable should be able to contradict the noble and holy. Just when you felt the novel sliding into irreparable despair, Bellow would dazzle you with humor and irony. Just when you were ready to abandon yourself to sweet serenity and carelessness, he would sober you with brutal, street-wise truths.

If you find yourself at the end here wondering who the hell this Saul Bellow person is, I encourage you to find out.

You already know who Rowling, Grisham, Crichton, Brown and Clancy are. This summer, take a chance with a Bellow novel to try something new; he rarely disappoints.