The Life of Saul Bellow

Starred review from August 27, 2018
This masterful account of the second half of Bellow’s life from Leader (The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915–1964) is impressive in both content and accessibility. The biography opens at an exciting point: Bellow, with the publication of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Herzog, catapults to the highest echelons of literary success. Leader combines Bellow’s life story with close readings of his major (and sometimes minor) texts, highlighting the autobiographical content of Bellow’s fiction. Although generous to Bellow, Leader shows the highly flawed person existing alongside the great writer. The book depicts a man caught up in mid-century notions of masculinity, displaying a volatile temper, expecting women to wait on him, and flaunting his dominance. While garnering an array of literary honors—National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel—Bellow continually disappoints his children and friends, and careens from affair to affair and marriage to marriage. Yet Leader has a talent for finding the redeeming details that humanize Bellow—consideration to his assistant Mrs. Corbin; affection toward his only daughter, Naomi Rose, born when he was 84, five years before he died. Leader succeeds because his book never bogs down: despite its almost 800 pages, Leader knows when to move on, producing a compulsively readable biography.

September 1, 2018
Leader (English Literature/Roehampton Univ.) concludes his exemplary life of the famed Canadian-American writer whose literary successes were matched by familial psychodramas, feuds, and other such mishegoss.As the author picks up from The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 (2015), the subject of his biography has attained great fame and fortune. Henderson the Rain King (1959) has had five years to make waves, building on earlier books such as The Adventures of Augie March and Dangling Man, and now Herzog (1964) is out, nearly universally hailed and climbing the charts, "supplanting John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" on the bestseller lists. At the time, however, Bellow was not satisfied. Having established himself as a top-flight novelist, he tried his hand at a play that ran for only a month and received some of the toughest reviews of his career, along with a note from Lillian Hellman that Bellow summarized as "I've written a lot of interesting soliloquies, but there's not a play in sight." Undaunted, Bellow returned to prose with a vengeance, putting into practice his pronounced habit of taking every element from real life and conversation and working it into his fictional narratives. Leader ably charts Bellow's continuing evolution as a writer, which will cheer his fans: Bellow matched talent, after all, with an impressive work ethic. Less cheering are his relationships with children, lovers, and spouses, all of which involved considerable drama and, even on his deathbed, shouting and recriminations. His cantankerousness punctuates almost every page, as when he explodes in anger over a companion's going off to see a popular movie while he attended his son's wedding: "By eroding the standards of a wide literate audience," Leader glosses, "M*A*S*H was debasing as well as debased." Always hard at work and always in battle mode, Bellow emerges as a brilliant writer who never minded being disliked--and offered many reasons to do so.Though sometimes overly detailed, this is a top-notch exploration of one of the most important midcentury writers.

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Starred review from November 15, 2018
Martin Amis hailed fellow novelist Saul Bellow as the writer who made the higher autobiography of his fiction resonate more memorably than [the work] of any living writer. In this second volume of his definitive biography of Bellow, Leader illuminates both Bellow's remarkable personal experiences during his last four decades and the astonishing literary resonance of those imaginatively rewrought experiences. Readers see, for instance, how Bellow's tense campus confrontation with a student heckler becomes a pivotal episode in Mr. Sammler's Planet, how the horrific crime Bellow witnesses in Chicago informs the bestial violence pervading The Dean's December, and how the personal inspiration Bellow draws from spiritualist Owen Barfield animates Charlie's upper wakefulness in Humboldt's Gift. Leader recounts how turning his life into high art garners for Bellow a string of prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize, but Leader also exposes in the raw particulars of that life what Bellow himself calls his persistent and wicked habits of soul. Readers may detect such habits in Bellow's callous treatment of wives (five!), children, and friends, and in his heedless willingess to expose to public view intimate details of the relationships he potently fictionalizes. The many readers drawn to Bellow's fiction will thank Leader for this unflinching portrait.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 15, 2018

Leader (English literature, Roehampton Univ.) scored kudos for To Fame and Fortune, the first volume of his two-volume biography of American Canadian author Saul Bellow (1915-2005). This second volume is just as definitive and revelatory. By 1965, Bellow had published five novels and won the National Book Award for The Adventures of Augie March. Turning 50, he would go on to produce eight more novels, four short story collections, and a play, including his most compelling work, Ravelstein, at 85. Herzog (1964) won him a second National Book Award; he went on to add a third, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for literature. During the same period, he married wives two through four en route to his fifth, Janis Freedman, who turned out to be a keeper. Leader is the ideal biographer for Bellow, who was a perfectionist in his work but led a complicated personal life, evenhandedly negotiating his way through the contradictory accounts of the writer's amazing journey. VERDICT This is biography at its best and will appeal widely. [See Prepub Alert, 5/22/18.]--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2018

A Pulitzer Prize finalist currently teaching at Roehampton University in Great Britain, Leader has chronicled writers from William Blake to Kingsley Amis. Here he wraps up a two-volume biography of Saul Bellow. The first volume was called "a necessary work for any reader interested in 20th-century literature or literary biography" by LJ's reviewer.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.