Book review: The Life Of Saul Bellow: To Fame And Fortune, 1915-64

Leader’s account of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist weighs in at 812 pages, and this is only Part One, taking us up to the third of Bellow’s five marriages, writing of Humboldt’s Gift, and a secure position at the very summit of American letters.

Zachary Leader

Jonathan Cape, €55.30; ebook £11.69

Bellow’s life strikes me as characterful rather than eventful.

He misses out on most of the Second World War, moves around a lot for teaching jobs, and even his witnessing of the aftermath of Trotsky’s assassination has a second-hand air to it.

Everyone and everything gets poured into the fiction, and Bellow frequently has to defend himself for invading other people’s privacy.

He’s hard to like on this evidence — though he can be funny and charismatic, he is often described as touchy and self-absorbed.

Above all, he is ruthlessly convinced of his ability and mission to write great fiction, a conviction the world has amply confirmed.

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