The Life of Saul Bellow
To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Literature Book of the Year, Sunday Times
'Terrific' Guardian
'Enthralling' Spectator
'Magisterial' Daily Telegraph
'Unsurpassable' New York Review of Books
By the time Herzog was published in 1964, Saul Bellow was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America, described in later years by the critic James Wood as ‘the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century.’ Zachary Leader’s biography shows how this prose, with its exhilarating mixture of high culture and low, came into existence. It also traces Bellow’s life away from the desk, as polemicist, teacher, husband, father and lover. Fierce in his loyalties, Bellow was no less fierce in his enmities, combative in defence of his freedoms. Spanning the period from Bellow’s birth in 1915 to the publication of Herzog in 1964, volume one of this biography is the first since Saul Bellow’s death, and the first to discuss his life and work in its entirety.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first volume in this exhaustive project follows Nobel laureate Bellow's life up to 1964 and the publication of Herzog. (A planned second volume of the biography will cover the last 40 years of Bellow's life.) Leader (The Life of Kingsley Amis) begins with Bellow's ancestors in Russia and walks us through his move as a child from Quebec to Chicago. From there, Leader follows Bellow to New York City; Minneapolis; Paris; Princeton, N.J.; Pyramid Lake, Nev.; and R o Piedras, P.R., reading through Bellow's writing the same sense of itinerancy. Leader describes each year of Bellow's professional and romantic life in extensive detail, drawing upon collected letters and new interviews. That life proves to be populated by dozens of friends, girlfriends, colleagues, and acquaintances, each of whom is contextualized and described in depth here. Yet exhaustiveness is not a substitute for biographical insight, and Bellow as a living, breathing person remains somewhat elusive among all these stories and cul-de-sacs. That said, Leader has many valuable insights into Bellow, such as how he made use of his life in his novels, sometimes hurting others' feelings when they discovered versions of themselves in his books. An impressive achievement, this biography gives noble due to one of the 20th century's most significant writers.