Publishing his first novel "The Dangling Man" in 1944, it would be just year shy of a decade before Saul Bellow found himself propelled to the height of literary stardom in America for his third book "The Adventures of Augie March", garnering the first of his three National Book Awards for fiction. Hailed by scholars and critics as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, Bellow went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for "Humboldt's Gift" in 1976, and during that same year, received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Trademarked for his ability to examine, and capture with resilient conviction, the disorienting nature of modern civilization brought upon by materialism, suppressed hysteria, and misleading knowledge that have only compounded in relevance as American continues to hobble through the Trump era, such an approach has been adopted by many of Bellow's contemporaries and pupils including Philip Roth, whom the native of Lachine, Quebec, Canada taught at the University of Chicago. Remaining and inspiration today as he was then, here are five of the most poignant takeaways from what is, and will forever be, a literary legend.