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Summary
Summary
Masterly, original, Bellow: A Biography is an extraordinary achievement, the brilliant and long-awaited biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author of Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and other bestsellers. National Book Award nominee James Atlas here gives the first definitive account of Bellow's turbulent 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, which generated a vibrant new literature. Saul Bellow's parents fled Russia in 1913 and settled with relatives in Canada, where Saul was born. Bellow's boyhood in Quebec and Chicago, marked by his family's transient existence and struggle for economic survival (his father was a bootlegger for a time), provided inspiration for many of the memorable characters and scenes that animate his fiction. It was in Chicago that Bellow came into his own, discovering his unique voice and encountering many of the women, as well as the writers and intellectuals, who were to populate his novels and his life. Atlas draws upon Bellow's vast correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries in this rich and revealing account of one writer's experience of America's twentieth-century intellectual and literary history. As talented as he is enigmatic, Bellow has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award (three times), and, in 1976, the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his eighties, he published a new novel, Ravelstein, and, with his fifth wife, celebrated the birth of his fourth child. Detailing Bellow's volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relationships with women, prominent intellectuals, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of the life of one of the premier writers in the English language.
Author Notes
James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series, a joint venture of Penguin and Lipper Books that he conceived around 1996 as he was struggling with his Bellow biography. His idea was to pair well-known writers and biographical subjects, with the books to be 150 pages or so, short for the genre. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for a National Book Award.
James Atalas passed away on September 4, 2019 at the age of 70.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Long promised and much postponed, this first major biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author proves to be well worth the wait. Atlas's vigorous and incisive portrait grows out of thorough research and intuitive understanding, yielding a sharp-edged provocative portrait. Born in 1915 in a small town near Montreal, Solomon (later Saul) Bellow, the youngest son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was nine years old when his family settled in Chicago. Capturing succinctly the drab but vital essence of the Jewish neighborhood of Humboldt Park, destined to be the touchstone of Bellow's fiction, Atlas charts Bellow's book-obsessed boyhood, his fraught relationships with his overbearing father and older brothers, and the death of his mother just after his graduation from high school. But when Bellow settles down seriously to become a writer, the biography finds its center. Atlas's depiction of Bellow's haphazard, self-absorbed personal life - his five marriages, his four children, his many lover, his wandering progress from Chicago to New York to Europe to various college campuses and back again - is tart yet sympathetic. He is at his best in describing Bellow's development as a writer and intellectual. Friendships and rivalries - with high school friend Isaac Rosenfeld, the Partisan Review crowd, Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago - and the polemics and passions of postwar literary America spur on the prolific Bellow. His first, more cerebral novels were followed by the sprawling, exuberant Adventures of Augie March, then by his three triumphant H-novels - Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift - among others. From here on in, the business of celebrity and the gradual narrowing of Bellow's vision occupy Atlas; he has a gimlet eye for the ravages of time and fame. This is an accomplished, compassionate but unsentimental life. Agent Jeff Posternak, Wylie Agency. 6-city author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The definitive life of one of the century's great novelists. Atlas--a prominent journalist, editor, biographer (Delmore Schwartz, 1977), and cultural critic (Battle of the Books, 1992)--abandoned a projected biography of Edmund Wilson and turned to Bellow, whose "utterly distinctive voice" had long captivated him. (Bellow cooperated with Atlas but did not "authorize" his work.) He introduces the 22-year-old Bellow, freshly fired (for absenteeism) from his brother's coal-yard, and sketches the family's Russian-Jewish lineage (his father, who had fled to Canada in 1913, became a baker) and complete lack of interest in literature. Despite his environment, the future Nobel laureate was an extremely bookish boy, fiercely determined to become a writer in the face of enormous contrary pressures. "In his own family," Atlas claims, "Bellow wasn't taken seriously." His struggle for success consumes the most compelling pages of this remarkable portrait. We're introduced to Bellow's literary heroes (Russians are prominent), his writing routines (five hours every morning, with "compulsive" revisions that essentially rewrite each book many times over), and his life-long love affair with Chicago. Each major work is examined in detail (with a prÉcis, a summary of its critical reception, and a brief analysis). Like many literary biographers, Atlas is adept--perhaps too adept--at identifying the real-life counterparts of fictional characters, and he quotes a number of people who resented Bellow's portrayal of them. And he does not flinch from Bellow's prodigious reputation for womanizing--in fact, he positively leers at it (e.g., on an African river cruise, Bellow was "more interested in a Danish woman on board than in the wildlife"). Sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with opprobrium, Atlas describes some of the less appealing aspects of Bellow's personality (racism, narcissism, and misogyny)--but he also points out how the author, at 84, fathered a daughter and published a novel (Ravelstein, 1999) of "great originality." An unsparing but also affectionate portrait of the artist--with vivid splashes of scholarship, insight, and intuition. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Nobel laureate Bellow has frustrated the efforts of previous biographers, but Atlas, author of a highly regarded biography of poet Delmore Schwartz and founding editor of the Penguin Lives series, has succeeded masterfully in chronicling and interpreting Bellow's thoroughly literary life, difficult personality, and powerful work. Sharing his subject's Jewishness, devotion to literature, and intimacy with Chicago (the city, he observes, that Bellow has immortalized just as Joyce defined Dublin), Atlas writes forceful and fluent prose driven by his need to understand the man behind Bellow's controversial novels, notorious promiscuity, five marriages, and stormy friendships with men (including his boyhood comrade and rival Isaac Rosenfeld, the creepy Jack Ludwig, and Allan Bloom, the inspiration for Bellow's most recent book, Ravelstein [BKL F 15 00]). As Atlas traces the complexities of Bellow's Jewish-Russian-Canadian-American heritage, he argues convincingly that feelings of alienation and unworthiness are the fire that feeds Bellow's prodigious drive to write in order to heal his wounds, redress wrongs, and even exact revenge. Atlas also analyzes Bellow's fascination with the gritty side of life, mordant wit, perfectionism ("Bellow routinely threw out work that was better than what most novelists published"), academic experiences, conservatism, endless money and legal troubles, uneasy fatherhood (Bellow has one son by each of his first three wives and a baby daughter, born in his eighty-fourth year), and "jaunty vigor" in the face of self-created adversity. Book by book, relationship by relationship, prize by prize, Atlas portrays Bellow as a dapper and combative whirlwind of a man and a writer of "moral depth and commanding vision," tremendous artistry and chutzpah.
Choice Review
For years Saul Bellow frustrated the ambitions of prospective biographers by refusing access to his private papers (correspondence, drafts and revisions of works in progress) and interviews of his relatives or friends, but he finally acquiesced to Atlas, biographer of a close friend (Delmore Schwartz, CH, Apr'78). Atlas's impeccable research and lucid prose make for an accessible, rich account of Bellow's intellectual and emotional development as he emerges from the Yiddish-speaking immigrant milieu in Montreal and Chicago to become heir to Faulkner as the most significant US novelist of the 20th century. Atlas provides both biographical events and informed readings of Bellow's published works, setting the novels within the context of the resilient novelist's life. One serious qualm: Atlas's distinctly judgmental point of view results in his frequent citation of Bellow's moral failings, particularly his treatment of wives and friends. Though these matters have a place in biography, their reiteration leaves the reader with a sour taste of personal animosity and shifts attention from esthetics to ethics, from artistic achievements of the novelist to the value system of the biographer. That said, this substantial work of literary scholarship--complete with extensive bibliographical references--will undoubtedly be the necessary biography of Bellow for years to come. All academic and public collections. M. Butovsky; Concordia University
Library Journal Review
Atlas took on the difficult Delmore Schwartz and got a National Book Award nomination for this troubles. Now he takes on Bellow. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.