Bellow

A Biography

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by James Atlas

Random House, Inc

Due/Published October 2000, 608 pages, cloth

ISBN 0394585011

The long-awaited biography of Bellow from James Atlas here offers the first definitive account of Bellow's personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events--the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties--and amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America. Atlas draws upon Bellow's vast correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many others in this account of one writer's experience of America's twentieth-century intellectual and literary history. Detailing Bellow's relationship with Chicago, his volatile marriages and tempestuous relationships with women, prominent intellectuals, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is the story of the life of one of the premier writers in the English language.

 "Saul Bellow is a man of profound gifts and potent charm: a considerable challenge to any biographer. Like a sparring partner, James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in and out of Bellow's extravagant life, his extraordinary novels, with great dexterity. It is a most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a great American novelist."--Michael Holroyd

"James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly informed history of one of America's most original and gifted writers and a mythos of the artist's life in the perilous twentieth century. His Bellow is seen, heard, felt, assessed; intelligently and sympathetically viewed from a number of perspectives; as fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow's arresting fictional characters."--Joyce Carol Oates