Twenty minutes ago I saw the headline “Author Saul Bellow Dies at 89.” Paradoxically, his age and the length of his career* made his demise all the more startling–he seemed like such a fixture in the literary firmament that the issue of his mortality somehow seemed beside the point. But in the days to come I’m sure that famous quote from Humboldt’s Gift, the product of Charlie Citrine’s anguished philosophizing, will be recycled over and over: “Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”So now that Bellow’s career is definitively ended, we might be able to start to assess the scope of his legacy. It might seem like a grandiose claim, but you could argue that 150 years from now, assuming novels are still produced and humanity is around to read them, Herzog, his most achieved work, will be as widely circulated as anything by, say, Melville or Flaubert is today. And who can say I’m wrong? As Bellow’s passing pointedly reminds us, none of us will be around to find out.*His breakthrough work, The Adventures of Augie March was published in 1953–astonishingly, more than half a century ago. Its opening sentence seems to encapsulate the ambition and the arrogance of a writer who’s convinced now is the time to take over the running of the store from the Europeans:”I am an American, Chicago born–Chicago, that somber city–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; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”