Philip Roth will be officially announced Monday as the first-ever winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

The 74-year-old author of such works as Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral has previously won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.

Bellow, who died in 2005 at the age of 89, was known for classics such as Herzog, Humboldt's Gift and Seize the Day.

The Quebec-born writer and Nobel laureate was a longtime friend of Roth's.

"To my mind, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner form the backbone of 20th-century American literature," Roth said in a statement given to the Associated Press.

Last month, Roth won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman, a novel about illness and mortality inspired in part by Bellow's death.

Roth had previously received the Faulkner award for Operation Shylock (1994) and  The Human Stain (2001).

Publisher Houghton Mifflin has previously announced that Roth's next novel Ghost Writer will be released in the fall of 2007, the ninth and last to feature fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman.

The $40,000 US Bellow award will be given every two years.

With files from the Associated Press