James Atlas - Bellow: A Biography

You can apply virtually any complimentary adjective to this book: compelling, engrossing, incisive, profoundly enjoyable. In the vast intellectual range of his work, Bellow has been, in many senses, the Mind of America. James Atlas is now our Mind-Reader.

Scott Turow

Let me be upfront: Almost everything I know about Bellow that I didnt guess from reading him, I got from the encyclopedic Atlas. I could no more stop reading his biography than I could stop reading Saul Bellow after he blew the blinds off the windows in my head.

John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review

Bellow is not only a compelling story of a great and flawed writer, one who continues to demand our attention, but also a portrait of an extraordinary (and now rapidly receding) epoch in the history of American letters.

The New York Times

Bellow is a masterly model of the biographers art. It is balanced and even-tempered, composed with intelligence and grace, long enough to encompass its subject, yet not inundated with unnecessary detail. The subject deserves a big, important book, and Bellow is equal to the task.

Newsday

Well worth the wait. Vigorous and incisive a sharp-edged, provocative portrait.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

James Atlass biography is a deep, nuanced portrait of the Nobel novelists life, loves, city, and writings.

The Boston Sunday Globe

James Atlass Bellow, more than a decade in the making, triumphs over the multiple obstacles facing literary biography as art, achieving the crucial task of finding a shrewd, Been there, know that voice as instructive and entertaining as its subjects.

Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Nobel laureate Bellow has frustrated the efforts of previous biographers, but Atlas has succeeded masterfully in chronicling and interpreting Bellows thoroughly literary life, difficult personality, and powerful work.

Booklist, starred review

The definitive life of one of the centurys great novelists. An unsparing but also affectionate portrait of the artistwith vivid splashes of scholarship, insight, and intuition.

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A richly detailed account not only of Bellows life but of the literary-intellectual milieuschiefly Chicago and New Yorkthrough which the writer has moved since the 1930s.

Washington Post Book World

Atlas is superb at sketching in the intellectual, cultural, and social backgrounds that nurtured Bellows art. [His] biography deserves to join the company of the best literary biographies of our time: Nicholas Boyles biography of Goethe, Brian Boyds life of Nabokov, Richard Holmess life of Coleridge, and Richard Ellmanns biography of Joyce.

The Houston Chronicle

A dazzling portrait of the Tolstoy of Chicago.

The Chicago Sun-Times

Judicious admirable a vivid portrait of a complex, gifted, and sometimes exasperating man.

The Economist

The book is lively, intelligent, and as readable as it is thorough. Its judgments, more often than not, are persuasive. And while it will not please those for whom Bellow can do no wrong, most readers are likely to feel that it is written essentially out of admirationor out of a struggle to preserve that admiration.

John Gross, Commentary

Bellow is an astonishing, brilliant work. I cannot recall when a living writer was last the subject of such an intimate, full-length portrait.

Jay Parini, The Chronicle of Higher Education

An intelligent and perceptive, lively and absorbing narrative.

Jeffrey Meyers, The New Criterion

Magnificent. James Atlas is thoroughly engaged here. This is the book he was born to write.

James Kaplan, The New York Observer

A magnificent example of the best a literary biography can be: a scrupulously researched narrative of this major American authors life and a truly valuable study of the meaning and importance of the works.

Elle

Bellow is a big book, but all its bulk is muscle. It neither debunks nor canonizes its subject. Thankfully, Atlas the critic is just as probing as Atlas the shrink, and the result is stunning: a full-blooded biography with brains.

GQ

Bellow, the man and the artist, could not have been more thoroughly or eloquently rendered.

Vogue

Atlas says it well and with authority in this thoroughly entertaining biography: A.

Entertainment Weekly

2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright 2000 by James Atlas

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Modern Library and TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in hardcover by
Random House, Inc. in 2000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atlas, James.
Bellow : a biography / James Atlas.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Random House, 2000.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82833-0
1. Bellow, Saul. 2. Novelists, American20th CenturyBiography. I. Title
PS 3503. E 4488 Z 554 2002
813.52 DC 21
[B] 2001056270

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

Why dont you write a biography of Saul Bellow? The question was posed to me by Philip Roth. It came at a difficult moment in my life, when I was between projects and casting about for the next book to write. At the age of twenty-eight, I had published a biography of the poet Delmore Schwartzthe model for the dissolute genius poet in Bellows novel Humboldts Giftand had been inexorably identified as a career biographer. Did I want to write on Tennessee Williams? Cyril Connolly? Edmund Wilson? The last suggestion, put to me by Roger W. Straus, the founder of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and publisher of my Schwartz biography, had been so compellingI was a great admirer of Wilson and had read every word hed writtenthat I had signed a contract. How could a writer barely into his thirties turn down the opportunity to write the biographythe authorized biography yetof Americas greatest modern man of letters?

Five years later, I hadnt written a word. I hadnt even gone up to Yale to look at Wilsons papers in the Beinecke Library. As Philip Rahv, a founder of Partisan Review and one of my literary culture-heroes, used to say, It wasnt in the cards. Much as I loved Wilsons work, I had a toxic response to his character. The bullying proclamations, the tedious self-revelations, the drinking and philanderingin the end, he just didnt appeal to me as a subject to whose life and work I was willing to apprentice myself for the better part of a decade, the time any conscientious biographer of a major personage can expect to allot. And there was a more nagging disincentive: Wilson had already written it all himself. His copious journals, assembled in five volumes, and his letters, also thoroughly compiled in several fat volumes by his executor, Leon Edel, took up all the literary oxygen in the room; I thought there would be nothing left for me to do except stitch together a dutiful narrative. But the most compelling reason not to write his biography was a deeply personal one: I felt no emotional connection with my subject, no elective affinity, to borrow Goethes phrase. As a figure with whom I could identifyor at the very least through whom I could tease out, however subliminally, the hidden themes of my own lifeWilson left me cold. He wasnt my type.