Awards

• Long-listed for Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2016.
• Short-listed for Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2016
• Short-listed for Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2016 (UK)
• Shortlisted for Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2016.

Overview

The first major biography of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow. 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.

Full Product Details

9780099520931

Table of Contents

Reviews

A triumph. If it is hard to think of a literary biography of its scope, depth and literary integrity it is as much because of Leader's mastery of his subject as of Bellow's event-filled life -- George Walden * Evening Standard * The first volume by Zachary Leader might be the most intelligent, fair-minded and most carefully furnished Life of a contemporary novelist I have read... It challenges both the official and the fictional versions, it upends the self-justifying letters, and offers an account that is never knowingly uncomplicated, sentimental or prejudiced, and never dull -- Andrew O'Hagan * London Review of Books * Leader displays a phenomenal, line-by-line familiarity with Bellow's oeuvre. His biography is awesomely well-researched... His interweaving of life and works, letters, unpublished manuscripts and historical documents is seamless -- John Walsh * Sunday Times * It's a terrific biography. It's also a first-rate piece of literary criticism. The book doesn't really privilege the life or the fiction, or belittle the complexity of reading between them. But taken together they offer a very detailed kind of evidence, about the costs and benefits of Bellow's existential intensity -- Benjamin Markovits * Guardian * The most purely delicious literary biography that I've come across. Leader's calm, gradual, but serenely excited prose vibrates with the joy of his thought coalescing with his subject, Saul Bellow -- Richard Brody * New Yorker * Zachary Leader's Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 is already the equal of Richard Ellmann's great Life of Joyce. The first instalment is scrupulous, dispassionate, morally sensitive, profoundly informative and marvellously acute in its literary judgements. It's a miracle of lucidly marshalled detail -- Craig Raine, Books of the Year * Times Literary Supplement *

Zachary Leader's Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 is already the equal of Richard Ellmann's great Life of Joyce. The first instalment is scrupulous, dispassionate, morally sensitive, profoundly informative and marvellously acute in its literary judgements. It's a miracle of lucidly marshalled detail. -- Craig Raine, Books of the Year Times Literary Supplement Since Saul Bellow - along with William Faulkner - constitutes the sturdy backbone of twentieth-century American literature, a biography as lavishly detailed and craftily organized as Mr Leader's is a necessary addition to the library of major biographies of our strongest writers. Despite Bellow's every effort to find order and serenity in which to do his work, his life, as it is meticulously presented here, was no less wild and original than his novels, a turbulence of crises that might have killed him had they not been magically transfigured by a prose style as rich and roiling as Melville's into one of the liveliest, brainiest collections of vivid American fiction that is ours to treasure. -- Philip Roth A dazzling piece of work. It's shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. The Paris chapter, with the hilarious invented meeting with Scott Fitzgerald, and then the depressed and collapsing marriage, and finally the sudden lyrical breakthrough to Augie March, is one of many absolutely outstanding sections. Young Bellow himself comes steadily surging through, getting bigger and bigger: clever, ambitious, philandering, mordant, magnificent, dominating and always furiously typing, typing, typing. In a word, this Volume One has all the makings of an American epic. I enjoyed it immensely. -- Richard Holmes A great writer has found a great biographer. Leader's achievement is to bring supreme intelligence to the relation of the art to the life - in Bellow's case formidably entwined. Along the way we are treated to a fine evocation of an entire American literary culture, its follies, feuds and daunting seriousness. Above all, Leader's is an unsurpassable portrait of the turbulent life of a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments. -- Ian McEwan Zachary Leader has written a multilayered book about a colossal American literary life. His research is prodigious, his curiosity about Saul Bellow's epic career limitless, and he reinvents biography as a four-dimensional narrative of time, space, perspective, and genre. Leader sets forth Bellow's life history through his interviews and letters as well as those of his huge extended family, his wives, mistresses, children, friends, enemies, neighbours, colleagues, critics, rivals, teachers, students, agents, editors and publishers, and through analyses of Bellow's books and stories about them, and their books and stories about him. On a grand scale, as enthralling as it is masterful, The Life of Saul Bellow is one of the great biographies of our time. -- Elaine Showalter

Zachary Leader's Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 is already the equal of Richard Ellmann's great Life of Joyce. The first instalment is scrupulous, dispassionate, morally sensitive, profoundly informative and marvellously acute in its literary judgements. It's a miracle of lucidly marshalled detail -- Craig Raine, Books of the Year * Times Literary Supplement * The most purely delicious literary biography that I've come across. Leader's calm, gradual, but serenely excited prose vibrates with the joy of his thought coalescing with his subject, Saul Bellow -- Richard Brody * New Yorker * It's a terrific biography. It's also a first-rate piece of literary criticism. The book doesn't really privilege the life or the fiction, or belittle the complexity of reading between them. But taken together they offer a very detailed kind of evidence, about the costs and benefits of Bellow's existential intensity -- Benjamin Markovits * Guardian * Leader displays a phenomenal, line-by-line familiarity with Bellow's oeuvre. His biography is awesomely well-researched... His interweaving of life and works, letters, unpublished manuscripts and historical documents is seamless -- John Walsh * Sunday Times * The first volume by Zachary Leader might be the most intelligent, fair-minded and most carefully furnished Life of a contemporary novelist I have read... It challenges both the official and the fictional versions, it upends the self-justifying letters, and offers an account that is never knowingly uncomplicated, sentimental or prejudiced, and never dull -- Andrew O'Hagan * London Review of Books * A triumph. If it is hard to think of a literary biography of its scope, depth and literary integrity it is as much because of Leader's mastery of his subject as of Bellow's event-filled life -- George Walden * Evening Standard *

Since Saul Bellow - along with William Faulkner - constitutes the sturdy backbone of twentieth-century American literature, a biography as lavishly detailed and craftily organized as Mr Leader's is a necessary addition to the library of major biographies of our strongest writers. Despite Bellow's every effort to find order and serenity in which to do his work, his life, as it is meticulously presented here, was no less wild and original than his novels, a turbulence of crises that might have killed him had they not been magically transfigured by a prose style as rich and roiling as Melville's into one of the liveliest, brainiest collections of vivid American fiction that is ours to treasure. -- Philip Roth A dazzling piece of work. It's shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. The Paris chapter, with the hilarious invented meeting with Scott Fitzgerald, and then the depressed and collapsing marriage, and finally the sudden lyrical breakthrough to Augie March, is one of many absolutely outstanding sections. Young Bellow himself comes steadily surging through, getting bigger and bigger: clever, ambitious, philandering, mordant, magnificent, dominating and always furiously typing, typing, typing. In a word, this Volume One has all the makings of an American epic. I enjoyed it immensely. -- Richard Holmes A great writer has found a great biographer. Leader's achievement is to bring supreme intelligence to the relation of the art to the life - in Bellow's case formidably entwined. Along the way we are treated to a fine evocation of an entire American literary culture, its follies, feuds and daunting seriousness. Above all, Leader's is an unsurpassable portrait of the turbulent life of a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments. -- Ian McEwan Zachary Leader has written a multilayered book about a colossal American literary life. His research is prodigious, his curiosity about Saul Bellow's epic career limitless, and he reinvents biography as a four-dimensional narrative of time, space, perspective, and genre. Leader sets forth Bellow's life history through his interviews and letters as well as those of his huge extended family, his wives, mistresses, children, friends, enemies, neighbours, colleagues, critics, rivals, teachers, students, agents, editors and publishers, and through analyses of Bellow's books and stories about them, and their books and stories about him. On a grand scale, as enthralling as it is masterful, The Life of Saul Bellow is one of the great biographies of our time. -- Elaine Showalter Zachary Leader has read everything, interviewed everyone, and woven it all together into a biography of Saul Bellow on a grand scale. Staggering in its research, rich with insight into the relationships between his family origins, the lives he pursued, the people he knew, and the books he wrote, this account lays bare the alchemy of Bellow's imagination and the sources of his literary achievement in profuse and arresting detail. -- Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark and Why Not Say What Happened

Author Information

Zachary Leader is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of Reading Blake's Songs, Writer's Block, Revision and Romantic Authorship and The Life of Kingsley Amis. Among the books he has edited are The Letters of Kingsley Amis and On Modern British Fiction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available