To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964

The Life of Saul Bellow

The first major biography of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow.

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

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

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

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 His interweaving of life and works, letters, unpublished manuscripts and historical documents is seamless

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

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

As a friend to Saul and as an awestruck admirer of his astonishing work, I was not always at ease reading portions of this painfully intimate biography. Nonetheless, the book's sweep and majesty – like that of its subject – are not to be denied. All the personal strife is there, the controversies and the disasters, his magical power of observation, that intellect, along with a meticulous record of how, with what labor – the peasant doggedness and the meticulous workmanship and the grinding patience and the hard won inspiration – the great novels came to be written.

A dazzling piece of work. It’s shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. The Paris chapter, with the hilarious invented meeting with Scott Fitzgerald, and then the depressed and collapsing marriage, and finally the sudden lyrical breakthrough to Augie March, is one of many absolutely outstanding sections. 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.

A great writer has found a great biographer. Leader's achievement is to bring supreme intelligence to the relation of the art to the life - in Bellow's case formidably entwined. Along the way we are treated to a fine evocation of an entire American literary culture, its follies, feuds and daunting seriousness. Above all, Leader's is an unsurpassable portrait of the turbulent life of a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments.

Zachary Leader has written a multilayered 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, neighbours, 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.

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, author of Dancing in the Dark and Why Not Say What Happened

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 and very long - the author happens to be a putter-in, not a leaver-out. But readers who enter into it will find a multitude of various fascinations: the gangland machine of Chicago, for instance; the tremors and prepercussions of the sexual revolution; Bellow's Romantic lineage (the affinities with Blake and Wordsworth); and the currents and commotions of the American cultural terrain, with its factions and rivalries, its questing energies, its fierce loyalties, and its fiercer hatreds.

A monumental book that makes us see the greatest of American novelists in a fresh and generally attractive light

Seven hundred pages in and still 40 years of life and writing to cover, Leader has already outstripped previous biographers.

Exemplary, scrupulous, dispassionate, detailed, well-read, enthralling...

Bellow’s authorised biographer has approached the task of doing justice to the life of “the most decorated writer in American history” with indefatigable rigour’

Leader draws deeply on newly uncovered letters and journals to piece together this richly detailed life.

It is destined to become the standard work on Bellow for decades… [A] splendid biography.

This is a fascinating, beautifully observant book.

This volume crackles with quotation from his writings, accompanied by bold, persuasive analysis. Essential, addictive reading or anyone interested in Bellow.

As a piece of research and writing, the book is worthy in multiple ways. The best thing about it is that Leader understands literature…so he’s interested in Bellow for the right reasons, and his critical assessments are informed and disinterested.

When Leader’s second volume is published, the completed biography is likely to be hailed as definitive – and rightly so.

The amount of detail here is staggering… But the details never become too dense or overwhelming, thanks largely to Leader’s clear, brisk style… [Is] what will surely become the standard biography of Bellow for years to come.

A meticulous and masterful first-part biography… Leaves readers hungry for the next instalment.

Leader’s exhaustive work refreshes our interest in the works themselves, as any great literary biography should.

Definitely a biography which had left me wanting to read more Bellow novels but now with a greater understanding of the man behind the writing.

full of illuminating critical insights, and his research is formidable

A monumental book that makes us see this greatest of American novelists in a fresh and generally attractive light.

Impeccably researched... a magisterial portrait of a writer who was ruthless in his determination to “become great”.

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.

Literature Book of the Year, Sunday Times 
 
'Terrific' Guardian 
'Enthralling' Spectator 
'Magisterial' Daily Telegraph 
'Unsurpassable' New York Review of Books 
 
By 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.

The Life of Kingsley Amis

The eagerly-awaited authorised biography of Kingsley Amis.

Leader has surpassed himself... he gives us not only the man, but also his milieu; he gives us not only the compelling virtues but also the staggering flaws. This is the best biography I have read for ages: deeply researched, crisply written and beautifully judged

Very thorough and very straight-talking. It's also very clear in its aims...He displays the facts of each matter plainly, allowing the reader to deliver their own praise and blame, and counterbalances them with his attention to the work. It's an impressively well-judged response

Marvellous...It has become a fashion to denounce long biographies as telling us more than we need to know, but Leader's is a triumphant vindication of its 900-plus pages. It's a pleasure to read, and the accumulation of detail gives a real sense of a life being led

This is a book of true stature about a complex talent.  Few literary biographies can match it for depth and intimacy

Marvellous...I ought to say that this book is 200 pages too long, but as I enjoyed almost every word of it, I can't

In Zachary Leader, who has edited the letters, he has an omniscient biographer, who relentlessly truffles out parallels with Amis's life in every novel

Elegantly organised, lovingly detailed, and - how could it not be? - eruptively funny, Zachary Leader's book is hard to put down

Leader edited Amis's Letters, and this biography is in its way superb. Well-written, balanced... it makes sensible connections between the novels and the life

Unsurprisingly in a biography of this size, he really has left no stone unturned

Leader is authoritative, erudite, steeped in his sources and balanced in his judgements

Mr Leader's style and approach are unfussy and effective... Exhaustively researched, it is likely to be definitive

A portrait of great complexity that is both an exhilarating and a melancholy read

Zachary Leader is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. His books include On Modern British Fiction (2002) and Revision and Romantic Authorship (1999). His editing of Kingley Amis's Letters was described as 'omniscient' by John Carey in the Sunday Times, 'wondrously thorough' by Ian Hamilton in the London Review of Books, and 'exemplary' by David Lodge in the Times Literary Supplement.

In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist. 
 
Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on hundreds of previously unpublished letters, Leader's biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis's childhood, school days, life as a teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. 
 
He explores Amis's fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis's work. As the editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, hailed in The Sunday Telegraph as 'one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art', Leader is more than qualified to be his authorised biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.

Zachary Leader

Leader is our hyper-sensitive ammeter, charting the myriad effects of all this fame on his difficult, brilliant subject. A great feat of scholarship and, at the end, a moving testament to one of the last century’s greatest writers.

Sunday Times, **Literary Book of the Year**

This will stand as the definitive account. Leader talked to the surviving three wives and drew on the memories of Bellow’s three sons, as well as more than 100 friends (and one or two enemies) and devout literary progeny including Martin Amis and the critic James Wood.

This second volume of biography perfectly captures the spirit of a complex genius… Bellow calls for a sensitive balance between censure and understanding, to avoid overshadowing his genius, and it is hard to imagine anyone doing it better [than Zachary Leader].

Zachary Leader’s monumental biography of Saul Bellow…[is] minutely researched and clear-eyed… Leader is wholly steeped in Bellow’s oeuvre and able to find all the fictional equivalents of the real people who filled his life.

Leader’s portrait manages to be both subtle and even-handed… Leader’s two-volume biography is an astonishingly detailed and thoughtful record of an important life.

In the second and final volume of his meticulously objective biography… [Leader] gives us all the information from every angle, rewarding the patient reader with a multi-dimensional portrait of this contradictory, conflicted, brilliant, difficult human being [Saul Bellow]. And although this is a big book, it’s actually a miracle of compression and clarity, given the size of the life. Best of all, Leader always makes time to remind us why we’re here: for the work itself, which he quotes from generously and with relish.

Leader’s biography is a monumental piece of scholarship… It is also thrilling to read… With this enthralling, massively detailed book, Leader has not laid Bellow bare so much as enriched him.

Leader’s work… will almost certainly become a prism through which his subject is seen from now on… a monument to this iconic figure’s legacy. Exhaustive, respectful, essential.

[A] magnificently researched book... highly informative... admirable.

Leader’s second volume... is very close to the naked truth about Bellow.

Leader’s exhaustively researched, well-written and impressive biography does justice to the intriguing character and tormented life of a literary genius. It reveals that Saul Bellow was the most coruscating stylist, the most brilliant intellect, the most compassionate and great-souled writer in modern American literature.

Leader gives us the life in lucid, pithy prose whose fact-accumulating velocity can, at times, suggest Bellow's own expressiveness. His book is meticulous, clear-headed, and now the best possible source for anyone who wishes to understand better Bellow's grumpy genius.

Leader chronicles the art-life relationship with a high-definition precision and amplitude. His sedimentary method lends both volumes a richly satisfying density of texture, like impacted strata of multicoloured rock. He maps the whole fractured geology of Bellow’s mind and, at the bedrock layer, finds a curious hankering not for fuss but peace.

Leader captures… [Bellow’s] iridescence perfectly, showing how far his life was stitched into the fabric of his work in heightened colours, and providing a running commentary of elucidation and criticism.

Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow is that rarest of things, a towering biography that closes with a satisfying click.

[A] compelling account… Leader’s biography brings Bellow’s quirks, individuality and difficulty to life. Most importantly, though, it sends us back to what matters most: the art.

Love and Strife, 1965–2005

The final volume of the definitive authorised biography of one of the greatest American writers. 
 
‘A moving testament to one of the last century’s greatest writers’ Sunday Times 
 
At forty-nine, Saul Bellow was at the pinnacle of American letters – he was rich, famous and critically acclaimed, with the best yet to come: Mr Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, all his best stories. He went on to win two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. However, away from his desk, Bellow's life was set to become embroiled in controversy: over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. 
 
From the women he pursued and his turbulent family relations, to his struggles with cultural relativism and the perceived excesses of civil rights movements, this second and final volume of Zachary Leader's monumental Life of Saul Bellow charts Bellow's heroic energy and will throughout his life, right to the end - where his immense achievements and their costs, to himself and others, became ever more apparent. 
 
'Brilliant' Spectator 
'Compelling' Times Literary Supplement 
'Riveting' New Statesman 
'Superb' New York Times

Zachary Leader

Praise for The Life of Saul Bellow

Leader is our hyper-sensitive ammeter, charting the myriad effects of all this fame on his difficult, brilliant subject. A great feat of scholarship and, at the end, a moving testament to one of the last century’ ...

This will stand as the definitive account. Leader talked to the surviving three wives and drew on the memories of Bellow’s three sons, as well as more than 100 friends (and one or two enemies) and devout lite ...

This second volume of biography perfectly captures the spirit of a complex genius… Bellow calls for a sensitive balance between censure and understanding, to avoid overshadowing his genius, and it is hard ...

Leader is our hyper-sensitive ammeter, charting the myriad effects of all this fame on his difficult, brilliant subject. A great feat of scholarship and, at the end, a moving testament to one of the last century’ ...

This will stand as the definitive account. Leader talked to the surviving three wives and drew on the memories of Bellow’s three sons, as well as more than 100 friends (and one or two enemies) and devout lite ...

This second volume of biography perfectly captures the spirit of a complex genius… Bellow calls for a sensitive balance between censure and understanding, to avoid overshadowing his genius, and it is hard ...

Leader is our hyper-sensitive ammeter, charting the myriad effects of all this fame on his difficult, brilliant subject. A great feat of scholarship and, at the end, a moving testament to one of the last century’ ...

This will stand as the definitive account. Leader talked to the surviving three wives and drew on the memories of Bellow’s three sons, as well as more than 100 friends (and one or two enemies) and devout lite ...

This second volume of biography perfectly captures the spirit of a complex genius… Bellow calls for a sensitive balance between censure and understanding, to avoid overshadowing his genius, and it is hard ...

Books by Zachary Leader

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