The writer and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow was an American master, and now he has an episode on the long-running Public Broadcasting Service series of that name to prove it. “The Adventures of Saul Bellow,” which has its premiere December 12, is billed as the “first ever major documentary” on the writer. It is directed by Assaf Galay.  

“Adventures” discloses that Bellow was the breakthrough, the writer who not with the sword but with the pen conquered American letters. After him, the Jewish deluge — Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and their progeny. The takeover was so successful that no less a giant than John Updike felt compelled to pen a trilogy about a fictional Jewish American writer, Henry Bech. There was, it seemed, no other kind.   

It is not easy to understand what has taken Bellow so long to get his television due. Born outside of Montreal to Jews from tsarist Russia, Bellow moved to Chicago at age 9. He was stamped by the city and in time would emerge as one of its preeminent bards, equally fluent in prose that was street smart, book wise, and brash enough for Bellow’s ebullience and his esotericism.

Toward the beginning of “Adventures,” the writer Salman Rushdie — now recovering from fatwa  — remarks that Bellow was a “Columbus of the near at hand.” His brothers and father thought of him as a “schmuck with a pen.” There were faults in Bellow’s character, but his commitment to tracing what Roth calls the “Bellovian glide” from the street to high culture, never wavered.   

Bellow graduated from Northwestern University, and after a peripatetic period that involved a sojourn at Paris funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a spell at New York City, he returned to the Windy City. He would spend more than three decades on faculty at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, teaching alongside Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, and other conservative luminaries. 

Bellow was prolific as both a writer and a marrier. “Adventures” moves through the words and the wives (there were five of them) in conventional fashion, marshaling an array of talking heads, alongside clips of Bellow himself, to deliver a handy introduction to the author’s life and letters. We get fellow novelists Martin Amis and Roth (recorded before his 2018 death) on Bellow’s craft and former wives and children and his life at home. 

At its best, “Adventures” points the viewer toward the works that exert an enduring gravitational pull. “The Adventures of Augie March,” with its propulsive start — “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted” —  is hailed as a Second Founding of American fiction, a “Call me Ishmael” for the Pax Americana. 

“Humboldt’s Gift,” a Pulitzer winner from 1976, is a roman à clef centered on Bellow’s relationship with the poet Delmore Schwartz, here represented by the character of Von Humboldt Fleisher. Like Schwartz, Fleisher is a poet of immense promise who ruins himself, his potential curdling into wasteful tragedy. A prodigy who won praise from Thomas Stearns “T.S.” Eliot and William Carlos Williams, he died a recluse at the Chelsea Hotel. 

Bellow was indebted to life for “Ravelstein” as well. A slim and valedictory volume written in his ninth decade, it is a portrait of Bloom, the classicist who achieved improbable celebrity with his “The Closing of the American Mind.” There is a Bloom stand-in, too, and the characteristic medley of high and low, ravishing surfaces and precipitous depths. Scandal, too — the book outed Bloom, who would die of AIDS, as gay. Some saw it as a betrayal.    

For Ruth Wisse, Bellow’s work surfaces a “possibility that approaches what Vladimir Jabotinsky called hadar, dignity or nobility.” This is true especially for his characters who are schlemiels. Their number includes Moses Herzog of “Herzog,” who admits, “If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me.” It also includes Arthur Sammler, who “crawled his way” out of a mass grave only to be subject to American indignities.

“Mr. Sammler’s Planet” testifies to Bellow’s conservative turn, the journey from a youth of Trotskyite sympathies to a man implacably opposed to the New Left, which sought to topple the universities and traditions of learning that were indispensable to his own art. That book concludes with Sammler’s belief that “we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” Bellow is gone, but his work, still alive, is well worth knowing.