This award is not for a specific book but honors Saul Bellow's lifetime contribution to American literature as a whole. Born in Canada and raised in Chicago, Bellow is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American fiction, having received the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He remains the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and in 1990 the National Book Foundation presented him with this lifetime achievement medal.

A towering voice in American letters who explored modern society's disorientation and the enduring dignity of the individual with wit and intellectual depth.