The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1

March 9, 2015
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 Río 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.

May 1, 2015

The broad brushstrokes of the life of Saul Bellow (1915-2005), one of America's most decorated writers, have been calcified as legend, none more than the image of the irascible lion in winter looking back on his extraordinary life with a sense of both accomplishment and regret. But to fully understand Bellow at the end of his life, one must return to the first five decades: the son of Russian immigrants settling in Quebec before landing in the chaos and exuberant energy of prewar Chicago; a young man discovering the world and his attraction to women and the penning of his debut novel, Dangling Man, during World War II; the budding artist cultivating his passion in the early and mid-career novels (The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog); and his myriad relationships with the most accomplished writers and intellectuals of the day. "The competing claims of life and art...is a prominent theme in many biographies," Leader (English literature, Roehampton Univ., UK; The Life of Kingsley Amis) writes. "It was also a theme in Bellow's fiction." Leader takes that nexus of life and art as his starting point. Drawing on previously unavailable material and scores of interviews for the first volume in a projected two-volume study, Leader delivers a definitive portrait of Bellow's first 50 years. VERDICT A necessary work for any reader interested in 20th-century literature or literary biography. This completes the picture recently sketched out by Greg Bellow (Saul Bellow's Heart) and Saul himself in the collected nonfiction title There Is Simply Too Much To Think About (edited by Benjamin Taylor). [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]--Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge State Coll., GA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 27, 2018
This masterful account of the second half of Bellow’s life from Leader (The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915–1964) is impressive in both content and accessibility. The biography opens at an exciting point: Bellow, with the publication of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Herzog, catapults to the highest echelons of literary success. Leader combines Bellow’s life story with close readings of his major (and sometimes minor) texts, highlighting the autobiographical content of Bellow’s fiction. Although generous to Bellow, Leader shows the highly flawed person existing alongside the great writer. The book depicts a man caught up in mid-century notions of masculinity, displaying a volatile temper, expecting women to wait on him, and flaunting his dominance. While garnering an array of literary honors—National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel—Bellow continually disappoints his children and friends, and careens from affair to affair and marriage to marriage. Yet Leader has a talent for finding the redeeming details that humanize Bellow—consideration to his assistant Mrs. Corbin; affection toward his only daughter, Naomi Rose, born when he was 84, five years before he died. Leader succeeds because his book never bogs down: despite its almost 800 pages, Leader knows when to move on, producing a compulsively readable biography.

December 1, 2014

On the centenary of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow's birth, Leader, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, offers the first of a two-volume study. He's dug deeply, having been granted access to previously restricted material, and interviewed over 150 of Bellow's friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, some of whom have been mum until now.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.