"Since Saul Bellow - along with William Faulkner - constitutes the sturdy backbone of twentieth-century American literature, a biography as lavishly detailed and craftily organized as Mr Leader's is a necessary addition to the library of major biographies of our strongest writers. Despite Bellow's every effort to find order and serenity in which to do his work, his life, as it is meticulously presented here, was no less wild and original than his novels, a turbulence of crises that might have killed him had they not been magically transfigured by a prose style as rich and roiling as Melville's into one of the liveliest, brainiest collections of vivid American fiction that is ours to treasure." -- Philip Roth "A dazzling piece of work. It's shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. The Paris chapter, with the hilarious invented meeting with Scott Fitzgerald, and then the depressed and collapsing marriage, and finally the sudden lyrical breakthrough to Augie March, is one of many absolutely outstanding sections. Young Bellow himself comes steadily surging through, getting bigger and bigger: clever, ambitious, philandering, mordant, magnificent, dominating and always furiously typing, typing, typing. In a word, this Volume One has all the makings of an American epic. I enjoyed it immensely." -- Richard Holmes "A great writer has found a great biographer. Leader's achievement is to bring supreme intelligence to the relation of the art to the life - in Bellow's case formidably entwined. Along the way we are treated to a fine evocation of an entire American literary culture, its follies, feuds and daunting seriousness. Above all, Leader's is an unsurpassable portrait of the turbulent life of a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments." -- Ian McEwan "Zachary Leader has written a multilayered book about a colossal American literary life. His research is prodigious, his curiosity about Saul Bellow's epic career limitless, and he reinvents biography as a four-dimensional narrative of time, space, perspective, and genre. Leader sets forth Bellow's life history through his interviews and letters as well as those of his huge extended family, his wives, mistresses, children, friends, enemies, neighbours, colleagues, critics, rivals, teachers, students, agents, editors and publishers, and through analyses of Bellow's books and stories about them, and their books and stories about him. On a grand scale, as enthralling as it is masterful, The Life of Saul Bellow is one of the great biographies of our time." -- Elaine Showalter "Zachary Leader has read everything, interviewed everyone, and woven it all together into a biography of Saul Bellow on a grand scale. Staggering in its research, rich with insight into the relationships between his family origins, the lives he pursued, the people he knew, and the books he wrote, this account lays bare the alchemy of Bellow's imagination and the sources of his literary achievement in profuse and arresting detail." -- Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark and Why Not Say What Happened
