The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 by Zachary Leader (PDF)

Description

For much of his adult life, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of, among other awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Life of Saul Bellow, by the literary scholar and biographer Zachary Leader, marks the centenary of Bellow’s birth as well as the tenth anniversary of his death. It draws on unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist’s relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow’s writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist’s development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities—as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American. The biography will be published in two volumes. The first volume, To Fame and Fortune: 1915–1964, traces Bellow’s Russian roots; his birth and early childhood in Quebec; his years in Chicago; his travels in Mexico, Europe, and Israel; the first three of his five marriages; and the novels from Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March to the best-selling Herzog. New light is shed on Bellow’s fellow writers, including Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, and on his turbulent and influential life away from the desk, which was as full of incident as his fiction. Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader’s powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, “the greatest of American prose stylists in the twentieth century.”

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A fringe benefit of a big biography like this, in addition to giving you information about someone who’s important to you, is that it gives you so much history, both political and cultural.Also, lots of just juicy stuff:In 1937, studying anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Bellow with Isaac Rosenfeld translated The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock into Yiddish. Translated back from the Yiddish, “I grow old, I grow old, / I shall wear my trousers rolled” becomes “I grow old, I grow old, / And my belly-button grows cold.” “Do I dare to eat a peach?” becomes “May I eat a prune?” “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” becomes “In the room where the wives / are speaking of Karl Marx and Lenin.On September 19, 1937 student Bellow,. a Trotskyite at the time, writes: “So far we have met only Stalinists, who are confused, New Yorkers, nice, snooty people. Know nothing, never heard of Trotsky. I am posing as a liberal, biding my time.”Some critics have complained that Leader’s biography is over-researched and digresses too frequently, but you have to admire the effort involved , and so many of the digressions are memorable.Bellow called the literally huge and hugely influential art critic Harold Rosenberg “the only man I know who fills a telephone booth from top to bottom.”In 1948, living in France, Bellow takes a dim view of that country (as Dostoyevsky did, we’re reminded) , although he grants that “there is not a nation anywhere that does not contradict its highest principles in daily practice.”At one point, Bellow was caught up with Wilhelm Reich and actually got an orgone box to promote “total and repeated orgasms” for mental health. As Bellow and others were discussing Reich, James Baldwin – ever adept at cutting through baloney – intoned: “The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights.”Bellow was in no sense a modest man, but he could be wonderfully frank about shortcomings. At one point he said of his The Adventures of Augie March: “Looking back, I think I took off too many (restraints) and went too far. I had just increased my freedom and like any emancipated plebeian I abused it at once.” When asked what the novel was about, he would sometimes answer, “It’s about two hundred pages too long.”Even the extensive notes at the back of the book yield gems. A reader would do well to at least scan them before closing the book. For instance, a quote from D. H. Lawrence I’d never encountered before: “Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the philosopher, and the ”poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”The notes also contain further indications, as in a letter to Bernard Malamud, of Bellow’s reservations about The Adventures of Augie March.I look forward to the second volume of this biography Leader is working on now.

⭐Total immersion in a life is an apt description of Volume 1 of Bellow’s early life ending with the publication of Herzog. Humboldt’s Gift has always been my favorite of his books and while I realized it was a Roman a Clef I didn’t know how many of his novels were based on real people and occasions. Most of his characters were known to their counterparts and were enjoyed or resented based on the presentation. Herzog rips Bellow’s marriage to his second wife Sasha; yet she remarks that she should have expected the treatment having married a writer. Bellow swiftly ascended the ranks of promising writers and was highly regarded by his peers. His books deal with ideas and fraught emotions rather than following strict plotlines. As a winner of the Pulitzer and later the Nobel, he is among the famous U.S. writers and deservedly so. Leader leaves out nothing, including short trips into the backgrounds of every character introduced—all of which contributes to the milieu that constituted Bellow’s colleagues. His family history and background also receive a full treatment; again contributing to one’s comprehension of his character which aspires to understanding man’s emotional and moral dilemmas.

⭐Roughly 650 pages, this first volume of a superb biographical study, takes Bellow to age 49, when he has already achieved unprecedented success, with much more to come. The book offers a detailed personal life, is not a critical literary biography, and is packed with details, almost day to day, on Bellow’s relationships, teaching, writing, personality, and his strong attachment to the USA, despite being born in Canada of immigrant Russian parents. His role as a modern Jewish writer is a main theme in his life and thought.

⭐If you want a so-called definitive biography on Bellow, this is probably it, although the author says he is writing a second volume. I will never get through the first volume. The writing skids all over the place from every Bellow book, character and traces myriads of threads from the writer’s life in his books. After reading Richard M. Cook’s thoroughly researched biography of Alfred Kazin, as well has his compilation of Kazin’s Journals written over a lifetime, I thought I had found the gold standard in Biographies. I did and unfortunately this biography is so overwritten as to be tediously boring.

⭐Life of SB, Vol 1: Whets my appetite for reading volume 2, when I can get it..

⭐always Saul Bellow’s books

⭐The interlinking of Bellows’ fictional character with his personal life was a particularly clever touch. I can’t wait for the next volume.

⭐read some,never time to

⭐Superbly researched and written, demonstrates how closely much of Bellow’s finest work was based on his own early life.

⭐I am not usually a fan of autobiographies,this is a glorious exception.It is so beautifully written,intelligent and insightful.There are so many details about this great writer’s life;it is not sensational,it neither flatters nor denigrates Bellow.It is a joy to read this book. It is obvious Leader appreciates Bellow the writer.Bellow was an awake and aware human being.A generous book in every sense-highly recommended!

⭐Fabulous book – excellent packaging. favourite author and stunning biography about him.

⭐Great biography. Worth reading.

⭐A great read!

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