There are three writers who became the most famous and most important Jewish American writers after the war: SAUL BELLOW, BERNARD MALAMUD AND PHILIP ROTH.  

SAUL BELLOW (1915 –2015) was born in Canada and grew up in Chicago. He translated the most famous short story by I. B. Singer „Gimpel the Fool“. He became famous for his impersonal, intellectual style of his writing. He was influenced by Gustave Flaubert. In his works, he is describing the changes in the world and the destruction of European civilization.

His themes were reflected already in his first novel, The Dangling Man, 1944. This novel was influenced by Trial by Franz Kafka. The protagonist is an average man, of no importance who is seized with war hysteria when he is waiting for his call-up papers. Bellow concentrates on the interpersonal relationships during the time of war. Their inability to communicate rationally. The protagonist is happy to go to war because his moral ideals and traditional way of life were destroyed. 

Among his other important novels belong: Dean’s December – in this novel he is contrasting the lie in totalitarian Romania and the ghettoes in Chicago, where the blacks are dying in the streets. In all of his novels, he is dealing with the search for identity in the modern world. He describes how the tradition and background influence the lives of his characters. Mostly he writes about intellectuals who are still looking for their place in modern society. He is contrasting the spiritual life and moral values with empty materialism. All of his novels are set in the modern world.

Other works: Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. 

BERNARD MALAMUD (1914–1986) was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. In his second novel, The Assistant (1957), Malamud found his characteristic themes -- man's struggle to survive against all odds, and the ethical underpinnings of recent Jewish immigrants. Malamud's first published work was The Natural (1952), a combination of realism and fantasy set in the mythic world of professional baseball. Other novels include A New Life (1961), The Fixer (1966), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), and The Tenants (1971). He also was a prolific master of short fiction. Through his stories, in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots First (1963), and Rembrandt's Hat (1973), he conveyed -- more than any other American-born writer -- a sense of the Jewish present and past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend. Malamud's monumental work -- for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award -- is The Fixer. 

Philip Roth (1933–2018)) became famous with Goodbye, Columbus (1959). It consisted of a novella and five short stories and described the life of a of Jewish middle-class family. Ten years later he published Portnoy's Complaint. In this "masturbation story" the narrator searches for freedom by using sex as his way of escape. From Malamud and Bellow, Roth has differed in a more ironic view of the lives of the Jews. Roth's memoir of his family, Patrimony, won the National Critics Circle Award in 1992. THE HUMAN STAIN (2000) was set in the 1990s at the height of the Clinton sex scandal.