The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964

by Zachary Leader

For much of his adult life, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of, among other awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Life of Saul Bellow, by the literary scholar and biographer Zachary Leader, marks the centenary of Bellow's birth as well as the tenth anniversary of his death. It draws on unprecedented access to Bellow's papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist's relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow's writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist's development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities--as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American.



The biography will be published in two volumes. The first volume, To Fame and Fortune: 1915-1964, traces Bellow's Russian roots; his birth and early childhood in Quebec; his years in Chicago; his travels in Mexico, Europe, and Israel; the first three of his five marriages; and the novels from Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March to the best-selling Herzog. New light is shed on Bellow's fellow writers, including Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, and on his turbulent and influential life away from the desk, which was as full of incident as his fiction. Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader's powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, "the greatest of American prose stylists in the twentieth century."

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Literature, History, American, American History

812 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2015

Reviews

[Barry Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first got into Saul Bellow by reading "Humbolt's Gift," his fictionalized biography of Delmore Schwartz. I knew of Delmore because his story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," had apparently had a big influence on Lou Reed (his one-time student). Delmore was a strange and difficult guy and the biography brought out both his positive and negative qualities in a wonderfully human way. I'd liked "In Dreams Begin Responsibilties" too - probably because its linking of dreams and memories to film history, a topic of obvious interest to me. I also worshipped Lou Reed at the time, his songs like "Waiting For The Man," and "The Black Angel's Death Song," had for some reason revealed the essence of rock and roll to me in high school, when I heard a cover band do them, and led me to the whole Andy Warhol New York Art scene - and, later, people like William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, and The Talking Heads.

Lou Reed liked Delmore Schwartz, I suspect, because they shared an immigrant Jewish background and Delmore was a published author and poet, the first person to actually be the things Lou aspired to.

Anyway, that got me reading Bellow and, as a young man, I read several of his books, making the immigrant American son, who wants to live an intellectual and artistic life in a wholly new and modern American way real for me. Besides, Bellow was born in Montreal - a Canadian by birth.

This is the first volume of a big, deep 2-part biography of Bellow by Zachary Leader a writer and English professor who's also written biographies of Kingsley Amis and several other works. He's had complete access to Bellow's papers and done major interviews with all the remaining people and their relatives and has, I think, a pretty good handle on Bellow as both a man and a writer and this biography may be the definitive one of a writer who used the materials of his real life as clay to shape his art out of. It's a very detailed but very rewarding read for anyone interested in the subject and I came away with an even deeper understanding of Bellow as a writer and as a person. I'm waiting impatiently for the next volume to be released. - BH.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

No point saying much until volume 2 has been read. So far, so good.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read some of Bellow's books in the past and enjoyed them a lot. Moreover, he always struck me as an interesting person. Oddly, the Bellow I read was more later than earlier in his writings and I have long wondered about his earlier novels and novellas. Last year, I read a book of his nonfiction, which was very good, and decided to read some more Bellow. The problem then was which ones to choose. It was then that I heard about Zachary Leader's new biography and put it in my queue. I have also gotten more interested in literary biographies recently so this seemed like a good bet.

If done well, a literary biography will inform on the life of the writer. It will also provide information and context for the works of the author. Finally, it will cover how the life influences the work (and potentially vice versa). You get all of that in Leader's book. You learn all about Bellow, his family, his schooling, his wives, his lovers, his buddies - and a lot more. Best of all, Leader is not only a fine biographer but also a professor of English literature and is thus very helpful at going over the various possible linkages between Bellow's life and his works. I learned from this book never to become close friends with a modern novelist, unless you do not mind being profiled multiple times in various works. Leader does a good job on using Bellow's novels and stories to clarify issues in his life and show how aspects of his life are reflected in different works. There is a lot going on here and lots of references and cross references to follow and leader does a good job of presentation. It helps that Bellow lived a very interesting life.

The downside of this.is that this is a very long book that requires attention and thought to work through -- and once you have done it, you are only to 1964 (and Herzog), before he turns 50, and only on the middle of his five marriages. There are 40 years left to go in the story! Once I got far enough in, however, I did not want to stop and there are lots of "aha" moments throughout the book. The writing is good but requires attention. The chapters are long and cover general time spans. Several lines of narration are going at any given point in the book.

The book raises lots of issues along the way on the role of the modern novelist versus other types of social thinkers. I am increasingly coming to admire good novelists for linking general thoughts and ideas with the particular complex situations in which people live. Novels also have a lot to offer versus other forms of social theory in the coverage of ethics - what should people do in particular situations? This is not to say that Bellow or his characters are not flawed individuals - they are. However, looking at how people behave in immediate situations when all else is not equal is a critical question facing real people - and novelists and storytellers seem to have much to say here.

The book took a while to work through but was worth. I will soon be starting with Bellow's earlier novels to see what I have been missing.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

At a time when New York editors have been heard to say, “literary biography is dead,” when publishers prefer the three hundred-page life, top-of-the-line presses are still managing to birth behemoths like the first volume of Zachary Leader’s gazetteer, with chapter headings such as “Russia/Abraham,” “Liza/Canada,” “Chicago/Maury,” and later, “New York,” “Minneapolis,” “Paris.” Saul Bellow’s life is canonized quasi-biblical fashion,. Granted, Bellow is a Nobel laureate, but his reputation crested years ago—as Lee Siegel notes in “Wrestling with Saul Bellow: A New Biography Renews the Fight Over the Author’s Reputation” (New York Magazine, March 23, 2015). Siegel reports that agent Andrew Wylie has masterminded the Leader project in an effort to rehabilitate an old client.

Biographies have backstories, and like works of art, provenance often tells you a good deal about why and how a subject is accorded so much attention. In this case, of course, that other behemoth that has to be bulldozed out of view is James Atlas’s Bellow (2000), a powerful biography praised for its penetrating exploration of the writer’s psyche and his work—and blamed for the censorious note that crept into the prose of a disenchanted biographer. In Leader’s words, Bellow “initially, if fitfully,” helped Atlas, and then Bellow “withdrew and turned against him helping to produce the note of resentment some have heard in Atlas’s book,” the product, Leader acknowledges, of more than a decade’s labor. Some? What does Leader think? He is too politic to say, perhaps a wise move of the sort an editor and agent might advise. But Leader’s circumspection is the also first indication that his biography that is going to tread lightly over the rougher patches of its subject’s life and work. That Atlas has value is signaled at strategic places in Leader’s narrative, with phrases like “According to Atlas,” “described by Atlas,” “Atlas says,” “Atlas quotes,” “Atlas writes,” “Atlas recounts,” and so on.

Leader’s biography is about damage control—not only safeguarding Bellow, but also the genre of biography itself. How else to interpret Leader’s first chapter, “Bellow and Biography,” in which Bellow’s animus against biographers is given full play. Bellow declares he is a bird, not an ornithologist. Biographers fall into the latter category; they dissect and catalogue, whereas novelists create and unite. Bellow deplores biographers who try to use the writer’s life as a kind of template to superimpose upon the writer’s fiction. Leader himself identifies at least two dozen people in Bellow’s life who served as models for his characters—and not just as models, but sometimes as targets, as in the titular character of Ravelstein, Bellow’s scarcely disguised portrait of his friend Allen Bloom. The difference between Bellow and biographers—at least in Bellow’s mind—is that he transformed people into characters who became part of his language and imaginative world. Biographers, in Bellow’s universe, have no imagination. They are, to shuft the metaphor, carpenters—at best craftsmen.
So how is Leader able to square his own methodology with Bellow’s objections? Leader endeavors to show that the biographer’s efforts are more complicated than Bellow allows. The biographer proceeds by showing there is no one-to-one connection between the people in Bellow’s life and fiction—and also that actual body parts and brains are strewn all over Bellow’s transformative fictions. Writing biographies and novels is bloody business, and novelists and biographers are in the same organic soup, Leader implies, without ever directly challenging Bellow.

In effect, Leader’s opening chapter constitutes his license to ransack Bellow’s life for the root causes of his subject’s fiction. It seems likely, therefore, that Bellow should have been as outraged with Leader as he was with Atlas. In fact, I’d venture that Leader’s approach would be deemed even more offensive, because unlike Atlas, Leader rarely gives full reign to discussions of Bellow’s work. In other words, an early novel like Dangling Man (the first one Bellow published) is shrouded in biographical detail, so that it never quite emerges as—to use Bellow’s metaphor—a bird. Atlas, on the other hand, includes several solid, perceptive pages about this “apprentice work” that nevertheless “announced the arrival of a new and distinctive voice in American literature.” And Atlas provides context for his analysis, helping to explain how the novel “conjured up the texture of life in Chicago during that bleak era: the lonely men in rooming houses; the unemployed, vaguely bookish drifters getting by on the largesse of friends and relatives; the Hyde Park intellectuals discussing socialism, psychopathology or the fate of European man.” To be sure, this is what Bellow himself was doing—dangling—like Norman Mailer, wanting to finish a novel before he was drafted. Leader is on hand to notate the autobiographical elements of Dangling Man. Atlas does so, too, but then he breaks away to supply what every reader of Bellow and of this novel in particular wants: a literary analysis that ranks the novel more highly than Bellow—already set on creating greater works of literature—did. Leader, trying to channel the life of a writer, is faithful to Bellow’s experience of writing the book, but also unfaithful to how readers ought now to regard it. It is fascinating to see what Bellow makes of his own creation, but in the end a biography has to go beyond what its subject thinks,. This is where, it seems to me, Leader gets lost.

With Leader, the phases of Bellow’s life are linked to places—a seemingly reasonable enough way to structure a biography. But the places become so dominant that individual locations and character sketches of the people Bellow knew there chop up his fiction. As a kind of biographical dictionary, Leader’s book is invaluable. But as a literary biography, it seems digressive. Leader constantly breaks the narrative momentum of this first volume. For example, he describes a Kennedy White House dinner for André Malraux. Bellow took his place among two hundred distinguished artists (Leader provides a partial list), and later composed what the biographer calls an “aria” about the event. Even though many of the guests made their reputations as dissenters, that night they were on their best behavior, Bellow reports. He finds this close association with authority disturbing, although he notes that the greatest writers, like Pushkin and Voltaire, suffered similar humilations in proximity to power. Bellow decides that Samuel Johnson’s comportment when meeting George III deserves emulation: Rather than answer his majesty’s questions about a fellow writer, Johnson decides to keep his own counsel. The very next sentence in Leader’s account is a switcheroo: “In Humboldt’s Gift, Charles Citrine, in the course of lousing up Denise, recalls her preparations for what sounds very much like the Malraux dinner.” This is one of several discussions of a 1975 novel that appeared more than a decade after this installment of biography ends. It may seem churlish to criticize this violation of chronology—biography is often censured for its plodding chronological approach—but chronology is, after all, vital to the kinds of narrative that make biography valuable. When an event happens, and how it happens, is vital to the biographer’s interests, and yet here Leader seems intent on pursuing a mining expedition, superimposing the template in just the way Bellow abhorred. Such passages—and this one is more than a page—do not merely interrupt the narrative, they atomize Bellow.

For a reader of Bellow’s work curious about his life but also devoted to his fiction, Leader’s approach is apt to seem suffocating. Let those novels breathe! Let them expand in the biographer’s narrative. Flashing forward and back in Bellow’s work may seem a daring and provocative way of making a moment in his life meaningful, but such maneuvers also seem counterproductive. A reader who has not read Humboldt’s Gift, or who has not done so in some time, and who comes upon the Humboldt passage in Leader may well ask, “Tell me again, who is Denise?”

Leader’s best moments come when he relies on Bellow’s autobiographical writing, now conveniently collected in Saul Bellow: There is Simply Too Much to Talk About—Collected Nonfiction (Viking, 2015). In “Starting out in Chicago,” Bellow captures the anxiety and terror of becoming a writer in terms no biographer can ignore:
I walked about with something like a large stone in my belly. I often turned into Lawrence Avenue and stood on the bridge looking into the drainage canal. If I had been a dog, I would have howled. Even a soft howl would have helped. But I was not here to howl. I was here to interpret the world (its American version) as brilliantly as possible. Still I would have been far happier selling newspapers at Union Station or practicing my shots in a poolroom. But I had a discipline to learn at the bridge table in the bedroom.
This passage explains so much about why Bellow was prickly about his own work, and why he felt so isolated and incapable of just enjoying himself. Grounding a biography in Bellow’s sense of himself and how others reacted to the thin-skinned writer are what make Leader’s work valuable.

But there are too many times when the gazetter takes over, and when I yearned for something different, turning in my desperation to Mark Harris’s Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980), a quirky quest narrative of the sort biographers write when they cannot get their subject’s attention. I recommend using Harris to aerate Leader:
The uncelebrated author of Dangling Man was one of a great many young men and women starting out in writing during World War II without much indication whether this was the beginning or end of writing or how one confidently went about it, or where it might lead, or what the pleasure and the penalties might be, or what its real relationship was to money, love, livelihood, universities, philosophy and social reform. What would it do to one’s own mind. Bellow and hundreds of other young men and women milled at the starting line for the great marathon.
This wonderful passage captures Bellow in the moment, without all that hectic parade of scholarship and flashing forward to what he would later do with what he was now feeling. So much social history and psychology are packed into Harris’s paragraph that it feels like a liberation after the grind of reading Leader.

Do not, however, take this review as a diatribe against long, let alone multi-volume biographies. They do work, as Leon Edel, Michael Holroyd, and Robert Caro have demonstrated. But having the luxury of more than one volume ought to allow the biographer to stick with his young subject in the first volume, instead of constantly feinting towards the goalposts. Looking back at his life in “Starting Out in the Thirties” and musing on what was to come, Bellow gave his biographers a key they would do well to employ. “[I]n the language of my youth,” he concluded, “he didn’t know the half of it.”

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars because of the biographer's tone, particularly how he wrote about women.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read some of the big ones thirty-plus, even forty-odd years ago. Herzog, H's Gift, Henderson, also Dean's D, and last, Ravelstein. Lately, I reviewed Victim on GR. Back in college and grad school, the author stood out as one of the contemporary greats of American lit. Now, after James Atlas' 2000 bio, and then Leader's, which some sneered at as a corrective to Atlas' prurient obsession with B's sex life, I suppose outside his canonization in the Library of America, his inclusion within nearly any liberal arts seminar has, like many of once-revered works B taught to undergrads, likely ended.

I admit only a casual interest in Bellow's career, but after reading Ruth Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon (also reviewed), I figured this book (tellingly the L.A. Public Library online doesn't even carry Atlas as active in its system) might steer me to reconsider the baggy monsters and alert me to little creatures, his earlier and later shorter novellas and stories. Well, I wound up skimming most of this.

But such tomes are necessary for the scholars and critics and students to come. General audiences may well quail as did I at the massive detail. Yet before "character witnesses" and companions all pass away, it's a valuable effort to plumb the archives, dig up correspondence, and tape interviews.

As my son went to one of the colleges where B taught, I perked up at the recollections of his former wife, and Leader's ability to cite from the correspondence, B's own and that of his friends and foes, to conjure up the atmosphere of post-war college life, and (converting by a factor of 13), the hefty salaries in Cold War society doled out, at least to the beneficiaries of who one knew who, same as it ever was. Back then, the striving New York and Chicago immigrants' kids, ambitious to climb the ladder to the Ivy League, or at least Michigan, Minnesota, the U of Chicago, and land cushy tenure.

Before that happened to B., Leader evokes well the Old Country and Montreal, and he tracks well the impact on B. It's fun to learn how B. crossed paths and shared digs with James Baldwin, say, and with Arthur Miller, seeking to hide Marilyn Monroe from her fans in a run-down, hour north of Reno, desert getaway. B. did get around, and many pages dwell on his travels, love affairs, guest lectureships, and his increasingly comfortable situation, although he had to struggle early on. I have no idea if I have the stamina for volume two. Generally any writer's arc in its second half dwindles.

Yet, the conservativism already evident in his admirable rejection of Stalinist lies before many of his fellow travelers caught on, makes his principled stances worthy of respect. Even if predictably many in the Manhattan crowd hated his turn to moralizing, intellectual indulgences, and steady fortune.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Moore reviews the first volume (of two) of this bio of Bellow ::

"A comprehensive study of a Nobel laureate" (18 May 2015)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

'...and how frequently Bellow “was called upon, from Augie onward, to advise corporations, sit on boards and committees, and interact with corporate types.” This speaks to how seriously novelists were taken in the 1950s and 1960s, when they enjoyed a cultural cachet unthinkable today. (I can’t imagine any corporation asking, say, Jonathan Franzen or William T. Vollmann to advise it or join its board.)'

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking forward to the second volume!

[Tom van Veenendaal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leader writes an overlong and overstuffed biography of Saul Bellow, greatly harmed by him 'betting on the wrong horse' by repeatedly attempting to justify Bellow's behavior. It is legitimately hard to finish this book, because Bellow was an enormously nasty man, and Leader simply fails at balancing the man and his work in a fair way. His hero-worship wins out, which is funny because Bellow's reputation has understandably waned, and it seems clear history will not vindicate him. I'm sure this is the 'definitive' biography of Bellow, featuring interviews with people who died shortly after and detailing everything, I mean everything, you could possibly find about him. And maybe Leader can be somewhat forgiven for picking Bellow's side; after all, the biography will largely be read by those who admire him. Besides, James Atlas' biography of Saul Bellow was criticized for its lack of reverence for its subject, which was rather understandable, since Atlas knew Bellow personally, and no one who knew him personally ended up liking him, given enough time. I have to say, anytime a negative review of his works is quoted, I couldn't help but agree with it, and I don't think I will be alone in that. There's a reason nobody is reading him anymore. I hope it stays that way.

How can you possibly defend Bellow mistreating his wives horribly, including with physical violence, then writing books in which they appear as incarnates of evil once they divorce him? Leader goes for the easiest answer: it's only fiction! It just happens to be exactly what happened in real life, except changed in a way that makes Bellow morally and intellectually superior to those who 'betrayed' him. Really, his books are barely fiction, they're just self-aggrandizing memoirs. In reading this biography you will find that nearly every single event of his life made into his novels, directly, and that all his characters are fairly direct copies of people he knew in real life. When he was 8, he was in the hospital, and that episode appears in a novel, a short story, a paragraph in another novel, and another unpublished novel. That's simply a lack of imagination. People who praise him go out of their way to turn it into something positive, say he takes real life and turns it into wonderful fiction through a wave of the artist's wand, but I think that's nonsense: once you know the (often more interesting and balanced) real life origin of literally every single event in his novels, they lose their lustre. Every evil woman in his fictions is an ex-wive he is attacking, every incident is something he went through or heard about, even the eagle in Caligula in Augie March was based on the eagle Aguila and his owner Mannix. Bellow lied, saying he went out to hunt with Mannix several mornings. In reality, he stole passages about the eagle from Mannix's work, and out of fear of a lawsuit included a line 'crediting' Mannix by name.

One novel he could praise a thinly fictionalized version of his new wife (The Dean's December), a later novel he had divorced her and would attack essentially the same character, based on the same person, relentessly (Ravelstein). That's not just tasteless, it's artless: it's letting personal vindictiveness ruin your fiction. John Updike said it well in his review of the terrible The Dean's December: “Literature can do with any amount of egoism, but the merest pinch of narcissism spoils the broth.” And indeed Joseph Epstein is right to say that he "created no memorable female characters", failed as a storyteller, could not finish his books off properly. It turns out Bellow wrote in a fit of inspiration, without any planning, then didn't know what to do once he hit novella length and abanonded half a dozen books this way. Others he finished unsucessfully while using benzedrine tablets and having his poor wives take care of him and his sons. I can't say I'm surprised, because his novels lose steam and never stick the landing.

To put it briefly: Bellow was a monster and simply, in the last anayslis, not a great writer, and the more you read of and about him, the more that becomes clear. There's no way I will read the second part of his biography, because reading more about this nasty little man is the last thing I want to do. Reading an essay about him is almost too much of a waste of time, but a book of nearly 700 large pages? No thank you. Don't waste your time.

[Tom Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book in a planned two part biography of Bellow. It documents the years from 1915, Bellow’s birth, to 1964, the year “Herzog”was published. Zachary Leader has given us a wonder story/tale of Bellow’s family before the author was born. These sections, to me, formed the bedrock if Bellow’s vision as a writer, and is critical to the oeuvres of the author. The early events and his family stories had a weighted affect on his ideas. I did not read “Herzog” (I will now!) so i didn’t realize, when I studied”Henderson The Rain King” in college, or when I read “Humbolt’s Gift” as a commuter, i never bothered to research Bellow’s life. I guess i believed too much in The separation of author, Art and background. After the first two chapters of this thorough biography, some elements grew in my consciousness: 1., to read until the end if the bio, in preparation for part two’s release in November, 2., to start, asap, reading “Herzog” and 3., to carry, closely, like an umbrella, the images of Bellow, his tortured past, and relationships, all of which found a place in his character creations. If you want surprise, research, and the warmth and coveted history that was Saul Bellow, and his strong, resilient family’s past, read this bio without hesitation. Now, onward to the rest of the book!

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

. Total immersion in a life is an apt description of Volume 1 of Bellow’s early life ending with the publication of Herzog. Humboldt’s Gift has always been my favorite of his books and while I realized it was a Roman a Clef I didn’t know how many of his novels were based on real people and occasions. Most of his characters were known to their counterparts and were enjoyed or resented based on the presentation. Herzog rips Bellow’s marriage to his second wife Sasha; yet she remarks that she should have expected the treatment having married a writer. Bellow swiftly ascended the ranks of promising writers and was highly regarded by his peers. His books deal with ideas and fraught emotions rather than following strict plotlines. As a winner of the Pulitzer and later the Nobel, he is among the famous U.S. writers and deservedly so. Leader leaves out nothing, including short trips into the backgrounds of every character introduced—all of which contributes to the milieu that constituted Bellow’s colleagues. His family history and background also receive a full treatment; again contributing to one’s comprehension of his character which aspires to understanding man’s emotional and moral dilemmas. I will take a breather before starting Volume 2 which has recently been published.

[Philippe Lebon · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading I want to read ''Herzog'' ''Ravelstein'' .... ''lots of energy in Bellow and this biography''

[Alan Gerstle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since this book only has had twelve reviews on GRs, I thought I'd add this one. I hope its lucky. Literature sure hasn't been since the time when Bellow was publishing.

[Riley Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything that can be known about Bellow, Leader knows it.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written, totally enjoyable. Zachary Leader, for some reason, is immune from whatever personal, social or historical need to separate himself as a person from the personal failings of the subject of his biography. So he just writes it, without looking over his shoulder as poor Jimmy Atlas felt he had to do to signal that he disapproved of Bellow the man. (Though given what Delmore Schwartz came to think of Bellow, the expectation that he could have written a less-than-cold biography of Bellow was unrealistic.) Somebody righlty points out that Leader uses the novels to explain the life, rather than the other way around, but who cares! The life matters because of the novels. My only problem is that Leader is less interested in everything else Bellow was interested in - I felt this most in his treatment of the literary paperback-magazine The Noble Savage, whose format he doesn't bother to explain, and whose contributors after the first issue he doesn't attend to. Leader quotes a letter Bellow wrote to his editor defending the time he spends on the magazine because of his passionate interest in it - but we are cut off from his interest. This does seem to me a narrowing of Bellow, as if he had less of inner life when not writing fiction with an autobiographical dimension. But on everything else - Bellow's family, where he lived, girlfriends, wives, children - amazing justice, and full and luscious. When Leader touches on Hyde Park, the U of Chicago, Edward Shils, Richard Stern, other places and people I happen to know, he is perfect - which is rare, and a testimonial to his credibility on everything else. Leader is also consistently good - indeed excellent, on his readings of Bellow's writings and of other writers whom Bellow read, with one screaming exception: a freshman-at-BU-misreading of a passage from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
A great achievement to be the biographer of Bellow and Kingsley Amis - the mark of a great man to have pulled it off.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This takes a while to get off the ground, and isn't helped by the author's habit of bringing in every minor anecdote or aside, regardless of relevance. It heats up around the time Bellow has published The Victim - which V.S. Pritchett praised as the most original book for a generation, and which we now know sold barely more than two thousand copies during its original print run - and about to start composing his first masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March.

Legend has it Bellow travelled to Paris, his pockets stuffed full of Guggenheim money, composing his masterpiece by day and hobnobbing with the great thinkers and artists of the era by night. In fact, he hated the entire city ('grey', 'dismal'), barely surviving on the money he brought. The novella he had brought with him to finish was stillborn; he detested the trendy nihilism of the French intelligentsia in general, and Sartre in particular.

Seize the Day, for many Bellow's greatest book, and surely one of the greatest novellas in the language, was disliked by both his publisher and his editor, and even Bellow himself came to detest it in later years. Critics felt otherwise, preferring the book's sharp economy to the sprawl of his earlier work - which was a refrain that would be repeated throughout his career.

Leader does not view his subject simply, and the parts about Bellow's (many) wives and all they did for their largely ungrateful, serially philandering husband merit re-reading. If not as good as Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis, despite its periodic bagginess it makes for interesting reading.

[Michael Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

pretty great