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

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)