Zachary Leader

The Life of Saul Bellow:

To Fame and Fortune: 1915–1964.

Knopf, 832 pages, $40

reviewed by Carl Rollyson

At a time when New York editors have been heard to say “literary biography is dead” and when publishers prefer the three-hundred-page life, top-of-the-line presses are still managing to birth behemoths like the first volume of Zachary Leader’s gazetteer, with chapter headings such as “Russia/Abraham,” “Liza/Canada,” “Chicago/Maury,” and later, “New York,” “Minneapolis,” “Paris.” Saul Bellow’s life is canonized in quasi-biblical fashion. Granted, Bellow is a Nobel laureate, but his reputation crested years ago—as Lee Siegel notes in “Wrestling with Saul Bellow: A New Biography Renews the Fight Over the Author’s Reputation” (New York magazine, March 23, 2015). Siegel writes that Bellow’s agent Andrew Wylie has masterminded the Leader project in an effort to rehabilitate an old client.

Biographies have backstories, and, like works of art, provenance often tells you a good deal about why and how a subject is accorded so much attention. In this case, of course, that other behemoth that has to be bulldozed out of view is James Atlas’s Bellow(2000), a powerful biography praised for its penetrating exploration of the writer’s psyche and his work—and blamed for the censorious note that crept into the prose of a disenchanted biographer. In Leader’s words, Bellow “initially, if fitfully,” helped Atlas, and then Bellow “withdrew and turned against him helping to produce the note of resentment some have heard in Atlas’s