And the Nobel Prize winning writer Saul Bellow has died at the age of 89. He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. The writer Philip Roth Tuesday, “The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists — William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century.”