From the age of 49, when the publication of Herzog in 1964 made him rich as well as famous, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer prize, the Formentor prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal for fiction. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1976 and was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French. For Philip Roth, Bellow stands with William Faulkner as “the sturdy backbone of 20th-century American literature”, with a prose style “as rich and roiling as Melville’s”. James Wood has called him “the greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century”, a view he characterises as “relatively uncontroversial”. Ten years after his death, all of Bellow’s books are in print and his reputation remains undiminished.

In addition to Herzog, chief among his critical and commercial successes are The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000), published when he was 85. When asked which of Bellow’s works to start with, however, I often say the Collected Stories (2001), which contains several of his novellas, including The Bellarosa Connection (1989), a brilliant meditation on the psychic impact of the Holocaust, in Europe, America and Israel. Bellow’s stories and novellas, he claimed, were written “at the top of my form”.

He was born 100 years ago, on 10 June 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, a quiet working-class town just south-west of Montreal. His parents and older siblings, two brothers and a sister, were Russian-Jewish immigrants from St Petersburg. When he was three, the family moved from Lachine to the heart of Montreal’s Jewish district, where the hero of Herzog also spent his early childhood. Moses Herzog recalls this district as “rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather”, but possessed of “a wider range of human feelings than he had ever been able to find”. In Canada, Bellow’s loving, tyrannical father failed at everything: as farmer, baker, dry-goods salesman, jobber, manufacturer, junk dealer, marriage broker, insurance broker and bootlegger. In 1923, pursued by agents of the Canadian Inland Revenue, he fled Montreal for Chicago, followed months later by the rest of the family, who were smuggled across the border by bootlegging associates. The Bellows were illegal residents in the United States, as they had been illegal residents in Russia, St Petersburg lying outside the Pale of Settlement, the area of tsarist Russia to which most Jews were restricted.

The immigrant neighbourhood where the Bellows settled was on Chicago’s north-west side. Here, Bellow went to local state schools and became an American, while remaining loyal to his Russian, Canadian and Jewish heritage:

I never felt it necessary to sacrifice one identification for another. I’ve never had to say that I was not a Canadian. I never had to say that I was not Jewish. I never had to say I was not an American. I took all of these things for granted and in me you see a sort of virtuoso act of integration of all these diverse elements and I feel no particular conflict. I never felt any special discomfort over any of these elements. I’ve taken them all for granted because they are part of my history. If that history is mixed, scrambled, anomalous, difficult for any outsider less exotic to put together for himself, that’s not my fault ... I was faithful to what I was. I lived that way and I tried to write that way.

Bellow’s faith in his history, his “reverence for the source of one’s being” (a phrase taken from Santayana), could be said to underlie his mature style. At home he spoke to his parents in Yiddish. They spoke to each other and to Bellow’s older sister and brothers in Yiddish or Russian. At school he spoke English or French. And from the age of three he studied Hebrew. As a young child, “I didn’t know what language I was speaking and I didn’t understand if there was any distinction among these various languages”.

Bellow with Leonard A Unger in 1948. Photograph: Frank Scherschel/Getty

In Chicago, new ingredients were added to this linguistic mixture. Neither home, nor school, nor Hebrew school could keep Bellow from the street. Street language in Chicago was “rough cheerful energetic clanging largely good-natured Philistine irresistible” (a typically comma-free sequence) and American. “The children wanted the streets,” Bellow wrote, “they were passionate Americans, they talked baseball, prizefights, speakeasies, graft, jazz, crap games, gang wars.” The neighbourhood schools Bellow attended “earnestly tried to convert or civilise their pupils, the children of immigrants from every European country. To civilise was to Americanise us all.” In English class, “there was a core programme of literary patriotism”. In English composition, “we, the sons of immigrants, were taught to write grammatically. Knowing the rules filled you with pride. I deeply felt the constraints of ‘correct’ English. It wasn’t easy, but we kept at it conscientiously, and in my 20s I published two decently written books.” These were his first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), written to a daunting “Flaubertian standard”. In later life, Bellow called them his MA and PhD.

In Chicago he was part of a precocious circle of high-school intellectuals mad for literature, for politics, for philosophy. The writers they read fell into three broad categories: 20th-century American novelists, 19th-century European (including Russian) novelists and philosophers, and political theorists, chiefly Marxist. The American writers he most valued were linked in their resistance to what Bellow calls “the material weight of American society”, a weight that pressed on him directly through his business-minded father and brothers, for whom he was “a schmuck with a pen”. The Russian influence, both in literature and political theory, was especially strong. “As an adolescent I read an unusual number of Russian novels,” he told an interviewer, “I felt it was the Heimat you know.” “The children of immigrants in my Chicago high school ... believed they were also somehow Russian,” he wrote in a 1993 essay, “and while they studied their Macbeth and Milton’s L’Allegro, they read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well and went on inevitably to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the pamphlets of Trotsky.” By nine, Bellow was “a confirmed reader”, having gone through all the children’s books in the local library and graduated to the adult section, where he began with Gogol’s Dead Souls. The breadth and maturity of his early reading in Chicago is astonishing. A lodger in the Bellow household recalled seeing him at the kitchen table reading War and Peace and The Possessed at the age of 10. Almost from the start he was serious about his reading, and he remained so throughout his life, for more than 30 years spending two or three afternoons a week teaching and discussing influential works of literature, philosophy and political theory with colleagues and graduate students at the University of Chicago. Gore Vidal described Bellow to me as “the only American intellectual who read books”.

Bellow’s ambition to be a great writer and thinker, an ambition shared by his fellow high-school intellectuals, began early. According to his oldest friend, “he was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning. I mean, he never veered.” “I became very obstinate at a certain point in my life,” Bellow told the novelist Norman Manea. “I knew what was necessary to remain a writer and I wasn’t going to let anything interfere with it, not for my own sake so much as for the game itself as I thought it should be played.” This single-mindedness, at times indistinguishable from ruthlessness, combined with a determination not to be limited in self-expression, though it was not until the age of 33 that Bellow found a literary language that was “faithful to what I was”.

With his son Greg in 1944.

After high school, to the dismay of his father, who resented having to pay tuition, Bellow attended the University of Chicago on the city’s South Side, transferring in his sophomore year to Northwestern University, in the suburban town of Evanston, just north of the city. He also spent half a year at the University of Wisconsin, as a graduate student in anthropology, before returning to Chicago to write, supported by his first wife and her family. In his mid-20s, he came for the first time to New York and was introduced to the critic Alfred Kazin, an exact contemporary and already the author of an acclaimed study of modern American literature. Kazin’s first impression of Bellow, who had published almost nothing at this point, was that “he carried around with him a sense of his destiny as a novelist that excited almost everyone around him. Bellow was the first writer of my generation ... who talked of Lawrence and Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, not as books in the library but as fellow operators in the same business.” Kazin was an operator himself, in the New York intellectual scene, combative and rivalrous. Yet Bellow’s confidence impressed Kazin rather than antagonised him. “He was putting himself up as a contender. Although he was friendly, unpretentious and funny, he was ambitious and dedicated in a style I had never seen in an urban Jewish intellectual. He expected the world to come to him.” In addition, he was good-looking.

Gore Vidal described Bellow to me as 'the only American intellectual who read books'

That Bellow never talked for effect impressed Kazin. “His definitions, epigrams, were of a formal plainness that went right to the point and stopped ... There was not the slightest verbal inflation in anything he said.” The range of his observations was striking. Though “a nimble adept of the University of Chicago style, full of the Great Books and jokes from Aristophanes”, he was also an unembarrassed Yiddishist, as well as an aficionado of “big-city low life”. “Saul was the first Jewish writer I met who seemed as clever about every side of life as a businessman. He was in touch.” He seemed at ease with his Jewishness – Jewishness seemed the source of his ease. When challenged, however, Bellow “could be as openly vulnerable as anyone I ever met. Then he would nail with quiet ferocity someone who astonished him by offering the mildest criticism.” Bellow was prickly, could be difficult, but he could also charm. To Philip Roth, in an obvious (and acknowledged) fictional portrait, his charm “was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the drawbridge.”

Kazin saw that Bellow could make “the most microscopic event in the street” worth seeing “because he happened to be seeing it”. Here, from Herzog, is an example. In sweltering Manhattan, Herzog observes a house being demolished:

At the corner he paused to watch the work of a wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlours. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage.

Much of Bellow’s intense looking was at bodies, faces, ways of moving. “If a man or woman looked a certain way then it meant something to me, about their characters.” On the eve of a crucial bootlegging deal, the skin around the eyes of a character based on Bellow’s father, and the way he holds himself, tell us everything we need to know about his situation, his state of mind, even his fate. “Something appeared to have got him by the back of the neck and the head and twisted them forward so that he could not recover his normal posture. It was painful to see. The skin was tightened at his eyes so that his eyes would sometimes suggest those of an animal picked up by the scruff of the neck.”

Bellow found his distinctive voice as a novelist in 1949 in Paris. He was on a Guggenheim fellowship, at work on a depressing novel set in a hospital. In addition, he felt stuck in his marriage, disillusioned with the left orthodoxy that had been his political home, and dismayed at the prospect of a return to university teaching. One morning, as he walked to his writing room in Paris, Bellow’s eye was caught by the municipal workers cleaning the streets. Each morning the street cleaners opened the hydrants to let the water run along the kerbs.

There was a touch of sun in the water that strangely cheered me. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy – the flowing water freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul. But it wasn’t so much the water flow as the sunny iridescence ... I remember saying to myself, “Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as the running water.” My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel – it was poisoning my life. And next I realised that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery ... I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up. I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August – a handsome, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!”

Bellow decided immediately to write the imagined life of this pal and his family, whom he had last seen in the 1920s. The decision “came to me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present – I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.” This suddenness Bellow expressed in the language of the inaugurating experience. “It rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer.”

In 1958, newly elected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

There is a parallel here with the experience of Wordsworth, a lifelong influence. In the winter of 1799, Coleridge persuaded Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, to accompany him on a trip to Germany. Coleridge spoke German but Wordsworth did not. Depressed and isolated, Wordsworth suddenly found himself writing poetry about his childhood, one verse after another. Incidents from his boyhood flooded back to him, crowding out crabbed, inhibited false starts. What set in motion Wordsworth’s sudden burst of creativity was a memory of himself at four, bathing in the River Derwent in the Lake District, or standing alone, “A naked savage in the thunder shower,” an image resembling Bellow’s vision of “freewheeling” Charlie August yelling “I got a scheme!” What unites the two visions is a sense of being at home in the world, untrammelled. “In Paris, where Augie was being written,” Bellow recalled, “it was Charlie (that is, Augie) who resisted influence and control. Childish and fresh, he sat at the checkerboard and shouted: ‘I got a scheme!’ I, the writer, might be hampered, depressed. Charlie, however, was immune.” Bellow in Paris was less isolated than Wordsworth in Germany; he knew plenty of people, had good French, but when he later asked himself “whether I was at that time forced into myself in a special way ... I am able to answer in the affirmative.” The hospital book, with its constricting “Flaubertian standard,” was put aside and Bellow began to write The Adventures of Augie March, published four years later. The book came in floods: “All I had to do was to be there with buckets to catch it.”

The opening sentence of the novel came to Bellow at the moment of breakthrough:

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

In 1949, when Bellow voiced these words to himself in a Paris street, he was as much a rebel against what might be called the “Jamesian standard” as the “Flaubertian standard”; Henry James being revered in the late 1940s by literary intellectuals and professors of English, especially Jewish intellectuals and professors such as Leon Edel, Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv, an editor of Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books of its age. The proud patriotic declaration that opens Augie – about James’s great subject, “the whole American question” – is anti-Jamesian in its directness. Also anti-Jamesian is the sentence’s mix of registers: vernacular (“freestyle”, “go at”), biblical (“knock” is from “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” – Matthew 7:7). At the end of the novel’s opening paragraph, after a reference to Heraclitus, Augie tells us that “there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles”. The knock is a knock: crude, hard, loud. The knock this novel is, is also jangling, jarring. The opening recalls a moment in James’s The American Scene (1907), referred to by Bellow several times. Returning to New York, after a long absence in Europe, James is taken by friends to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a setting marked by “the hard glitter of Israel”. The Café Royal, with its many Yiddish-speaking authors and performers, is described by James as “one of the torture-rooms of the living idiom”. “Who can tell,” James asks, “in any conditions, what the genius of Israel may, or may not, be ‘up to’.” The quotation marks around “up to” suggest two unequally offensive meanings: “good enough for” or “equal to”, which is merely patronising, and “conniving”.

The Adventures of Augie March came in floods: 'All I had to do was to be there with buckets to catch it'

That Augie is Jewish and speaks an English in which Yiddish inflections, constructions and expressions are heard is part of what makes him, as he describes himself at the novel’s end, “a Columbus of those near-at-hand”. He recounts his adventures in a style of American speech largely absent from high culture. The guardians of this culture, Bellow told Philip Roth, were “our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors”. “These guys infuriated him,” Roth later commented. “It may well have been the precious gift of an appropriate fury that launched him into beginning his third book not with the words: ‘I am a Jew, the son of immigrants,’ but rather by warranting that son of Jewish immigrants who is Augie March to break the ice with Harvard-trained professsors (as well as everybody else) by flatly decreeing, without apology or hyphenation: ‘I am an American, Chicago born.’ ” Roth calls Augie’s decree “precisely the bold stroke required to abolish anyone’s doubts about the American credentials of an immigrant son like Saul Bellow”.

The style Bellow discovered in Paris enabled him, as he later put it, “to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities” that had previously been excluded from serious American fiction. “Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything available.” It is a language, as Martin Amis, Bellow’s great champion, puts it, “that loves and embraces awkwardness, spurning elegance as a false lead, words tumbling and rattling together in the order they choose”. Among the examples Amis approvingly cites are “glittering his teeth and hungry”, “try out what of human you can live with”, “a flat-footed, in gym shoes, pug-nosed woman”, constructions that vivify both the thing described and the describer. Not all these constructions work in Augie March, a novel Bellow came to value less highly than Amis, for whom it is the Great American Novel (“Search no further”). The new style was liberating, but “I was incapable at the time of controlling it and it ran away from me”. “Looking back,” he explained, “I think I took off too many [restraints] and went too far ... I had just increased my freedom, and like any emancipated plebeian I abused it at once.” (In later years, when asked what Augie was about, Bellow would answer: “It’s about 200 pages too long.”) The breakthrough served its purpose, however, providing Bellow with a language that could range from minute street particulars to elevated ivory-tower reflections.

Chief among its uses was to anatomise Chicago, where, as in wider America, “matter ruled”. In Augie March, Bellow focuses on small-time materialists, the immigrant and other businessmen of his youth; in the later novels and stories, he includes big-time lawyers, bankers and politicians. I especially like the lawyer Hansl Genauer in the story “Him With His Foot in His Mouth” (1982), with his “deep wrinkles of cunning” and eyes “like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the small-mammal house”. In Humboldt’s Gift, the lawyers’ faces are like the faces of the politicians and gangsters who run the city: “impenetrable massive cautious faces, the faces of conservative men who will not, unless you have a proper claim to it, give you the time of day”. The face of the gangster “Tanky” Metzger in the story “Cousins” (1984) is described by Bellow as “an edema of deadly secrets”. Tanky despises his intellectual cousin, Ijah, the narrator of the story. As Ijah explains: “I had taken America up in the wrong way. There was only one language for a realist, and that was Hoffa language [Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt Teamsters boss]. Tanky belonged to the Hoffa school.”

In 1982. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

In the first half of his career, from 1915 to the reception of Herzog, Bellow struggled successfully to escape the forces that would prevent him from writing. These forces are figured in his early novels as familial as well as social and cultural. “Do you have emotions? Strangle them,” declares the narrator of Dangling Man. “If you have difficulties, grapple with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine.” Hemingway is the main target here, though behind him lies an army of the unfazed, headed by Flaubert. Joseph, the narrator, is like his creator in several ways, not least in the pressure put on him by his family, his brother in particular. Bellow would later deprecate the novel, but to Edmund Wilson it was “one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the depression and the war”. The Victim, Bellow’s second novel, involves a protagonist battling external restrictions and impediments, as well as internalised ones. Like Bellow, Asa Leventhal is determined not only to call out his enemies, such as Kirby Allbee, the antisemite who haunts his every step, but to resist the paranoia such vigilance breeds. Though prentice work, the two early novels earned Bellow an influential following. Even before Augie appeared, Lionel Trilling declared him the most talented novelist of his generation. The novels after Augie cemented Bellow’s reputation. Seize the Day, about fathers and father-son relations, could not have been more different from Augie, in mood, register and scope. The differences are partly explained by an intervening work, an unpublished manuscript of 172 typed pages entitled “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son”, written during a period of intense preoccupation for Bellow both with his father, who died in 1955, and with his son, following the dissolution of his first marriage. Henderson the Rain King, the published work to follow Seize the Day, recaptures something of the buoyancy and a good deal of the boisterousness of Augie; its mixture of comedy and depression anticipates Herzog, as does the mountain of problems its hero faces: “my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!”

In the first half of Bellow’s career his struggle was for recognition, for freedom to write and to write as he wished. In the second half – from 1965 to his death in 2005 – recognition itself became a threat. Hounded by the demands of fame, distracted by its many temptations, he looked increasingly to a world beyond matter, one glimpsed in moments of Cheever-like luminescence. The mystical significance of these moments, intelligible to the heart if not the intellect, was given new prominence in the later novels and stories, though their settings remained firmly within the material or fallen world. But there were moments of luminescence from the start, in the life as in the work. Nowhere are they more memorable than in Paris in 1949 when the “sunny iridescence” of the waters running through the Paris gutters gave Bellow his voice.

• Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 will be published by Cape on 7 May.