The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 2: Love and Strife, 1965-2005
Zachary Leader
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
The second volume in the life of literary giant Saul Bellow, vividly capturing a personal life that was always tumultuous and career that never ceased being triumphant. Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters--rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing in the latter half of his life some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in the first. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. In this stunning second volume, Zachary Leader shows that Bellow's heroic energy and will were present to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, continue to be worth the examination of this vivid work of literary scholarship.
Product Details
Price
$22.00
$20.46
Publisher
Vintage
Publish Date
December 03, 2019
Pages
816
Dimensions
6.0 X 9.2 X 1.7 inches | 2.2 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781101910184
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
ZACHARY LEADER is professor of English literature at the Uni-versity of Roehampton in London. Although born and raised in the United States, he has lived in Britain for more than forty years and has dual British and American citizenship. In addi-tion to teaching at Roehampton, he has held visiting profes-sorships at Caltech and the University of Chicago. He was educated at Northwestern University; Trinity College, Cam-bridge; and Harvard University; and is the author of Reading Blake's Songs; Writer's Block; Revision and Romantic Authorship; The Life of Kingsley Amis, a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964. He has edited Romantic Period Writings, 1798-1832: An Anthology (with Ian Haywood); The Letters of Kingsley Amis; On Modern British Fiction; Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (with Michael O'Neill); The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries; and On Life-Writing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series.
Reviews
"Since Saul Bellow--along with William Faulkner--constitutes the sturdy backbone of 20th 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--a tremendous achievement--it draws the reader in wonderfully well, with its almost manic attention to biographical detail, and its inspired interweaving of Bellow's autobiography with his fiction. It's shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. 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 "Zachary Leader has written a multi-layered 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, neighbors, 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 "Richly detailed, Zachary Leader's admiring but clear-eyed chronicle of Saul Bellow's youth, talent, and his struggle for recognition is nuanced, impassioned, and capacious; from him we meet Bellow as if for the first time, as friend, lover, father, husband, American, and Jew-- and of course as the writer who energetically resisted despair and cynicism with his profound commitment to literature and to life. An essential book-- more than a biography, it's the story of American letters in the twentieth century."
--Brenda Wineapple "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 "This will stand as the definitive account of the making of Saul Bellow, an absorbing story of how a determined young writer emerged as one of the twentieth-century's most celebrated novelists."
--James Shapiro "It is, however, certain that I will not be alone in the expectation that The Life of Saul Bellow will prove definitive. Leader is respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne, and his literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly stylish and acute. The book is very learned,"
--Martin Amis, Vanity Fair
"Zachary Leader, the latest Bellow biographer, has found plenty... Leader is statesmanlike, fair-minded...He is particularly felicitous in his descriptions of Bellow's parents and their struggles"
--Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
"Unsurpassable. It is a valuable resource, and the prose is clear and poised."
--New York Review of Books
"Leader gratifyingly shows how Bellow transformed his personal limitations into liberating art."
--New York Magazine
"Will surely become the standard biography of Bellow for years to come."
--Washington Post
"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."
--The New Yorker
"Leader does full justice to both life and oeuvre in this chronicle of Bellow's struggle. . . . Leader's biography has the vital virtue of ringing true. . . . Leader's life of Saul Bellow is not merely head and shoulders above its predecessors, but given the depth of his research and judgment and its broad scope, it is hard to imagine it being bettered anytime soon."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"A fascinating analysis."
--BBC "A revelation."
--Barnes & Noble Review
"Uncommonly good. . . . [Leader] has not only made himself familiar with all of Bellow's facts. He has also made the vigilant reader welcome to them."
--Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
"Leader's research here...is astonishing. It is a banquet, a profoundly serious and scholarly examination of an important American writer."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Leader's Life of Saul Bellow is likely to remain the definitive biography. . . . Leader has our gratitude."
--Commentary
"Authorized and judicious. . . . Excellent. . . . Leader has clearly done new and prodigious work."
--Jewish Review of Books
"Will now stand as the definitive Bellow biography."
--Kirkus (Starred) "An impressive achievement, this biography gives noble due to one of the 20th century's most significant writers."
--Publishers Weekly (PW Pick)
--Philip Roth "A dazzling piece of work--a tremendous achievement--it draws the reader in wonderfully well, with its almost manic attention to biographical detail, and its inspired interweaving of Bellow's autobiography with his fiction. It's shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. 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 "Zachary Leader has written a multi-layered 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, neighbors, 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 "Richly detailed, Zachary Leader's admiring but clear-eyed chronicle of Saul Bellow's youth, talent, and his struggle for recognition is nuanced, impassioned, and capacious; from him we meet Bellow as if for the first time, as friend, lover, father, husband, American, and Jew-- and of course as the writer who energetically resisted despair and cynicism with his profound commitment to literature and to life. An essential book-- more than a biography, it's the story of American letters in the twentieth century."
--Brenda Wineapple "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 "This will stand as the definitive account of the making of Saul Bellow, an absorbing story of how a determined young writer emerged as one of the twentieth-century's most celebrated novelists."
--James Shapiro "It is, however, certain that I will not be alone in the expectation that The Life of Saul Bellow will prove definitive. Leader is respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne, and his literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly stylish and acute. The book is very learned,"
--Martin Amis, Vanity Fair
"Zachary Leader, the latest Bellow biographer, has found plenty... Leader is statesmanlike, fair-minded...He is particularly felicitous in his descriptions of Bellow's parents and their struggles"
--Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
"Unsurpassable. It is a valuable resource, and the prose is clear and poised."
--New York Review of Books
"Leader gratifyingly shows how Bellow transformed his personal limitations into liberating art."
--New York Magazine
"Will surely become the standard biography of Bellow for years to come."
--Washington Post
"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."
--The New Yorker
"Leader does full justice to both life and oeuvre in this chronicle of Bellow's struggle. . . . Leader's biography has the vital virtue of ringing true. . . . Leader's life of Saul Bellow is not merely head and shoulders above its predecessors, but given the depth of his research and judgment and its broad scope, it is hard to imagine it being bettered anytime soon."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"A fascinating analysis."
--BBC "A revelation."
--Barnes & Noble Review
"Uncommonly good. . . . [Leader] has not only made himself familiar with all of Bellow's facts. He has also made the vigilant reader welcome to them."
--Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
"Leader's research here...is astonishing. It is a banquet, a profoundly serious and scholarly examination of an important American writer."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Leader's Life of Saul Bellow is likely to remain the definitive biography. . . . Leader has our gratitude."
--Commentary
"Authorized and judicious. . . . Excellent. . . . Leader has clearly done new and prodigious work."
--Jewish Review of Books
"Will now stand as the definitive Bellow biography."
--Kirkus (Starred) "An impressive achievement, this biography gives noble due to one of the 20th century's most significant writers."
--Publishers Weekly (PW Pick)
