The PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction is awarded by the PEN American Center "to a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature." Initially carrying a stipend of US$40,000, the award was created with the cooperation of the Saul Bellow estate and through a grant from Evelyn Stefansson Nef. Announcing the first recipient of the award (Bellow's close friend Philip Roth), PEN president Ron Chernow said the award honors "one of America’s greatest writers...whose work over a forty-year career exemplified the capacity of fiction to encompass the totality of human experience. We are co