The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1 by Zachary Leader

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The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1

Name: The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1
Price: 17.99 USD
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Author: Zachary Leader
ISBN: 9781101874677

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Published on May 05, 2015 | 832 Pages

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Published on May 05, 2015 | 832 Pages

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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 Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader’s powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, “the greatest of American prose stylists in the twentieth century.”

“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.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“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.” —Vanity Fair

“Unsurpassable. It is a valuable resource, and the prose is clear and poised.” —New York Review of Books

“Will surely become the standard biography of Bellow for years to come.” —Washington Post

“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

“Leader gratifyingly shows how Bellow transformed his personal limitations into liberating art.” —New York Magazine

“It’s a terrific biography. It’s also a first-rate piece of literary criticism.” —The Guardian
“A fascinating analysis.” —BBC

“Zachary Leader’s Life of Saul Bellow is already the equal of Richard Ellmann’s great Life of Joyce. . . . Scrupulous, dispassionate, morally sensitive, profoundly informative and marvellously acute in its literary judgements. It’s a miracle of lucidly marshalled detail.” —Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year)

“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.” —London Review of Books

“Entrancing. We not only learn about Bellow’s life project; we feel it take shape with uncompromising determination.” —Wall Street Journal

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

“This magisterial biography is a fine testament to a life that was—at every step of the way—lived with exhilarating passion.” —Toronto Star

“Magnificent. . . . never prurient, always calm and morally intelligent—and unbelievably lucid, given the many-stranded complexity of the material.” —Sunday Times (Literature Book of the Year)

“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)

Author

Zachary Leader

ZACHARY LEADER is professor of English literature at the University 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 addition to teaching at Roehampton, he has held visiting professorships at Caltech and the University of Chicago. He was educated at Northwestern University; Trinity College, Cambridge; 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.

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The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1

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By Zachary Leader