Saul Bellow, who died yesterday at age 89, was the darkly comic master sociologist whom in a series of biographical novels such as “Herzog” and “The Adventures of Augie March” charted the fate of the American male soul across the 20th century.

His death was announced by his attorney, Walter Pozen, who said the writer had been in declining health but was “wonderfully sharp to the end.” Mr. Pozen said Bellow’s wife and 5-year-old daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass.

A Nobel laureate, Bellow may have been the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick. He was a three-time winner of the National Book Award, was awarded a Presidential Medal, and also won the Pulitzer Prize, for “Humboldt’s Gift,” in 1976.

When he won his Nobel Prize, also in 1976, the Swedish Academy cited his “exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy, and burning compassion.” In his acceptance speech, Bellow referred to Joseph’s Conrad’s belief that art is “what is fundamental, enduring, essential.” He joined Hemingway and Faulkner among other American Nobelists for Literature.

“The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists – William Faulkner and Saul Bellow,” Mr. Roth said Tuesday. “Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century.”

“If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest,” Ms. Ozick wrote in 1984, “then Bellow’s charge has been to restore the soul to American literature.”

In 2003, the Library of America paid Bellow the rare tribute of releasing work by a living writer, issuing a volume of his early novels.

In spite of, or in some cases because of, all the praise, Bellow also had detractors. Norman Mailer called “Augie March” a “travelogue for timid intellectuals.” Critic Alfred Kazin, a longtime friend who became estranged from Bellow, thought the author had become a “university intellectual” with “contempt for the lower orders.”

Old-fashioned, often dressing in bespoke suits, but not complacent, the author strove to ward off the “Nobel curse,” to not be softened by literature’s highest honor. He continued writing into his 80s. Hoping to make his work more affordable, he had his novella “A Theft” published as a paperback original in 1989.

His recent works included “The Actual,” a sentimental novella published in 1997, and “Ravelstein,” a 2000 novel based on the life of his late friend, Allan Bloom, author of “The Closing of the American Mind.” Also in 2000, Bellow was the subject of an acclaimed biography by James Atlas.

Bellow had a gift for describing faces, and the author’s own looks – snowy hair, aristocratic nose, and space between his front teeth – were familiar from book jackets. His personality was equally distinctive. In “Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator’s childhood sweetheart refers to him as a “good man who’s led a cranky life.” His longtime agent, Harriet Wasserman, once described him as being as “deeply emotional as he is highly intellectual and cerebral.”

He had five wives, three sons, and, at age 84, a daughter. He met presidents (Kennedy, Johnson) and movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson). He feuded with writers (Truman Capote, Mailer), and helped others, notably William Kennedy, whose work he helped get published.

Bellow had two plays produced on Broadway – “The Last Analysis” (1964), a farce that fared poorly, and “Under the Weather” (1966), a comedy that closed in a week.

A dedicated educator, Bellow continued to teach for decades after the success of his novels made it financially unnecessary, because he thought it kept his work fresh. He taught at New York University, Bard College, and had visiting appointments at many institutions. In 1963, he found a more permanent home at the University of Chicago, where he was for many years a member and then chairman of the Committee on Social Thought.

In 1993, he accepted a position at Boston University, where he taught a freshman-level class on “young men on the make” in literature.

While his most famous works were his novels, Bellow also produced a steady stream of critical prose, and wrote a critically acclaimed travelogue, “To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account” (1976). “These people are actively, individually involved in universal history,” he wrote: “I don’t see how they can bear it.”

Like his characters, Bellow’s life was an evolution from the unbearable-but-comic passion of the Old World to the unbearable but comic alienation of the New World.

The son of Russian immigrants, he was born Solomon Bellows on July 10, 1915, (or June 10, some sources contend) in Lachine, Quebec, outside Montreal.

His parents were immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father had been a dealer in Egyptian onions. The youngest of four children, he was the only one to be born in North America.

He dropped the final “s” from his last name and changed his first name to Saul when he began publishing his work in the 1940s.

When he was 9, his family moved to Chicago from Montreal. Bellow learned Hebrew and Yiddish as a young man, studying the Old Testament as a living text. His family life was one of violence (his father), sentiment (both parents), and humor (everyone). Nothing was left unsaid. Even when he was finding success as a writer, Bellow’s father browbeat him about doing something that was, to his eyes, unproductive.

Once he was living in Chicago, it would become the city whose Jewish life Bellows would celebrate with even greater tenacity than James T. Farrell did its Irish. Bellow majored in anthropology and sociology at Northwestern, and after graduating in 1937, took a fellowship to study anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. He was uninterested, and dropped out over the Christmas holidays, taking time out on a whim to get married in a double ceremony with a boyhood friend, Herbert Passin.

“Every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story,” he explained later. His social science training would later show itself implicitly in the habits of his mind, as well as explicitly in “Henderson the Rain King” (1959), a novel set in Africa concerning a millionaire searching for a cure for the sickness of his soul.

The classic Bellow narrator was a self-absorbed intellectual with ideals the author himself seemed to form during the Depression. While he would remember the fear most people had during those years, Bellow found them an exciting and even liberating time.

“There were people going to libraries and reading books,” he told the Associated Press in a 1997 interview. “They were going to libraries because they were trying to keep warm; they had no heat in their houses. There was a great deal of mental energy in those days, of very appealing sorts. Working stiffs were having ideas.

“Also, you didn’t want to waste your time getting a professional education because when you finished there would be no jobs for you. It seems that the time of the Depression was a suspension of all the normal activities. Everything was held up.”

Bellow eventually found a job in the editorial department of the Encyclopedia Britannica, where he worked on Mortimer J. Adler’s “Great Books” project. He took time off to serve in the Merchant Marines, an experience that served as material for his first published novel, “Dangling Man” (1944).

From the beginning, Bellow was determined to tell a different kind of American story, departing from the tight-lipped machismo of Ernest Hemingway.

“Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obeys this code,” Bellow wrote in “Dangling Man.” While the Hemingway hero keeps his problems to himself, Bellow declared, “I intend to talk about mine.”

While the Bellow’s themes were in place from the start, his prose matured later. As the author himself would acknowledge, his early books were too prim, too careful. Only in 1953, with “The Adventures of Augie March,” would readers see another Bellow: the funny Bellow, the immigrant Bellow, Bellow the son of a bootlegger.

“There was a way for children of European immigrants in America to write about this experience with a new language. I felt like a creator of a language suddenly and was intoxicated. It was truly intoxicating and I couldn’t control it. It took me several books to rein it in.”

“Augie March” and the books that followed – “Seize the Day,” “Henderson the Rain King,” “Herzog” – established him as a major writer. In each work Bellow lived up to Augie March’s idea of imaginative power, of inventing “a man who can stand before the terrible appearances.”

Bellow’s men stood before the New World and trembled. Nonbelievers amid the worship of machines and money, they shook with existential despair. They did everything from compose letters to dead people in “Herzog” to running off to Africa in “Henderson the Rain King.”

“There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it’s all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It’s the price of freedom: make the judgments, make the mental calls,” Bellow said.

Among his most personal novels was “Humboldt’s Gift,” which Bellow described as “a comic book about death,” culminating in a graveyard scene as emotional as anything he wrote.

The novel was also personal in other ways. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is an aging Chicago writer chasing a younger woman while trying to keep a former wife from ruining him financially.

Two years after the book was published, Bellow faced a 10-day jail term for contempt of court in an alimony dispute with his third wife, Susan Glassman Bellow.

An Illinois appeals court overturned the sentence.

In December 1999, Bellow’s fifth wife, Janis Freedman, gave birth to their daughter, Naomi. Bellow, 84 at the time, also had three grown sons from prior marriages, and quipped about finally having a girl: “If I didn’t succeed at first, I’ll try again.”