Saul Bellow, our most intellectual writer, mainlined the European novel of ideas into the veins of American literature and infused it with a high-octane style. His prose is exuberant, energetic, torrential; his voice intimate, learned, and allusive. His characteristic hero, a flawed, high-spirited highbrow, is—as he wrote in More Die of Heartbreak—“a genuinely superior individual, susceptible of course to human weakness and unable to manage his sexual needs … his love longings.”

James Atlas—who convincingly argues that “to read his books in consecutive order is to follow the contours of his biography” —has done exhaustive research, uncovering, for example, a well disguised description of Bellow in Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic case studies. He has mastered the sprawling material, and written an intelligent and perceptive, lively and absorbing narrative.[1] There are remarkably few errors, though some minor mistakes have sneaked into the text: Jiménez and Cádiz have accents; Tri-Quarterly and The Nigger [sorry!] of the “Narcissus” are mis-punctuated; socks don’t have tassels; and the quote on Mozart is by Alfred, not Albert, Einstein. Nathanael West was not going to a funeral (except his own) when he fatally crashed his car near the Mexican border; Richard Poirier is Catholic, not Jewish; Robert Hatch was literary editor of The Nation, not editor of The New Republic; George Walden, PPS to the British Secretary of State for Education and Science, was not “minister of higher education.” Atlas frequently misuses the word “comfortable,” and he misses Bellow’s allusions to Joyce’s