The Life of Saul Bellow

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 BooksBy 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.

Short-listed for Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2016 (UK)

“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”

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

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.

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