NEW YORK — Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in Herzog, Humboldt's Gift and other novels both championed and mourned the soul's fate in the modern world, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Bellow's close friend and lawyer, Walter Pozen, said the writer had been in declining health, but was "wonderfully sharp to the end.'' Pozen said that Bellow's wife and daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass.

The son of Russian immigrants, Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on July 10, 1915, in Lachine, Que. He dropped the final "s'' from his last name and changed his first name to Saul when he began publishing his writing in the 1940s.

When he was nine, his family moved from Montreal to Chicago.

He was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after the Second World War, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant's hustle, the bookworm's brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.

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

He was the first writer to win the National Book Award three times: in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, in 1965 for Herzog and in 1971 for Mr. Sammler's Planet. In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift. That same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, cited for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture.'' In 2003, the Library of America paid the rare tribute of releasing work by a living writer, issuing a volume of Bellow's early novels.

In spite, or perhaps 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.'' Biographer James Atlas accused Bellow of favouring "subservient women in order to serve his own shaky self-image.''

Old-fashioned, but not complacent, the author strove to ward off the "Nobel curse,'' to be softened by literature's highest honour. He kept writing into his 80s and, hoping to make his work more affordable, 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 Atlas' acclaimed biography.

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

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.

Bellow's 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 (John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson) and movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson). He feuded with writers (Truman Capote, Mailer), and helped out writers, notably William Kennedy, on whose behalf he lobbied to get his work published.

After teaching for many years at the University of Chicago, Bellow stunned both the literary and academic world by leaving the city with which he was so deeply associated. In 1993, he accepted a position at Boston University, where he taught a freshman-level class on "young men on the make'' in literature.

Bellow did study at the University of Chicago for two years and then transferred and got an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in nearby Evanston.

He was a contributor to the Partisan Review, along with Kazin, Mary McCarthy and the poet Delmore Schwartz, whom he would re-imagine as Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt's Gift. He worked on a novel he ended up destroying and eventually debuted with Dangling Man, in 1944.

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.''