Saul Bellow, 1915-2005

"The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright...talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology, and doing all this in Chicago, of all places."

-- from the NYTimes obit (perhaps found in It All Adds Up)

Here are some obits:
NYTimes
Washington Post
Chicago Tribune

Update, 4/10/2005: David Brooks discusses the animating tension of Bellow's work and its current absence from the scene.