100 most Famous authors

Saul Bellow Way is a one-block stretch of West Augusta Boulevard in Humboldt Park, running from Rockwell to Washtenaw, and named, of course, for the Chicago writer, who would have been 100 on June 10. He died in 2005 and received this honorary street seven years later, after his adopted neighborhood, Hyde Park, rejected a proposal for a similar honor.

Which was for the better: Saul Bellow Way feels more fitting in Humboldt Park, Bellow's first Chicago residence. Assimilated into the landscape and barely noticed, it's a portrait of unadorned familiarity: rows of two-and-three-flats, facades of red brick and gray stone, a fancy porch railing here and there. Otherwise, unremarkable. In fact, the house Bellow lived in at 9 years old stands out only as less distinctive than the rest, a cement block the color of a baseball glove losing its dye.

A few weeks ago, I rang its buzzer and a woman who lives there came to the door and said no, she didn't know who Saul Bellow was, but someone doing research on him came by a few years ago. On the sidewalk out front, I stopped a young couple and asked if they knew Bellow and they said they probably should but they didn't. I asked a dozen more passers-by and not one had a clue who the man on that street sign was. The closest I came to recognition was in the store at the end of his old block, Puerto Rican Food & Liquors. The man at the counter, the owner, Domingo Claudio Jr., grinned: "He was a poet, right? He was a writer — a writer-poet?"

Bellow came here from Montreal in the 1920s, his family lived down the street and he stayed in Chicago most of his life, I explained. The neighborhood was Jewish, Polish and Scandinavian then, full of Eastern European immigrants. And now, Claudio said, Puerto Rican, "though you see more white people — something new!"

Gentrification, I said. Saul Bellow's Chicago is coming full circle.

Maybe, he said, but still, nobody knows who he is anymore.

Which is a persistent theme in the newspaper and magazine essays and reviews written this spring to acknowledge the Bellow centennial:No one reads him now, his reputation has suffered, he is being lost to history — a highbrow author who regarded himself as a highbrow author and, therefore, hard to like today.