James Atlas is a little self-conscious about having spent 10 years writing Bellow: A Biography, but it's hard to imagine how the job could have been done any more quickly. Clearly Bellow, in addition to being one of the 20th century's most acclaimed and prolific novelists, was also one of the most peripatetic. Not the least of his maneuvers were his efforts to dodge biographers, though Atlas's determination eventually wore him down ("He realized that you weren't going away," Bellow's son tells Atlas). The result is a full-scale biography in the tradition of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce--in other words, the biography that a writer and cultural figure as important as Saul Bellow deserves.

Bellow fans won't be surprised by the details of Bellow's life, many of which are familiar from his novels and essays: youthful Trotsky clubs; waiting to be called up into WWII; lifelong enthusiasm for anthropology, philosophy, European literature, and other Great Books; sarcastic wit that verges on the malicious; friendships and rivalries with Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Edward Shils, Allan Bloom, Ralph Ellison, and other literati; innumerable wives, lovers, divorce lawyers, child-custody battles, and alimony struggles; big-shot brothers who disparage intellectuals; and of course, his beloved city of Chicago. Atlas, himself a Chicago native from the generation behind Bellow, covers all of this with patience and considerable authority, balancing Bellow's lively, fictionalized accounts with a helpful amount of historical background.

Atlas is also very good at establishing parallels between the tone of Bellow's novels and his mood at the time of writing them. Often the two are so closely intertwined it's not clear which came first: the freewheeling style of The Adventures of Augie March, for example, or the exhilarating period in Bellow's life that accompanied it. ("The book just came to me," Bellow wrote. "All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.") Similar parallels include the Flaubertian perfectionism of the early novels, the cuckold's outrage that inspired Herzog, the fame and loss that pervade Humboldt's Gift, the despair of The Dean's December, and the senescent recollection of The Actual and Ravelstein.

In a preface, Atlas, who is also the editor of the Penguin Lives biography series, describes the most discerning biographies as those "imbued with a profound sympathy for their subject's foibles and failings--imbued, to put it plainly, with love." One suspects that Atlas began this biographer-subject marriage with more love than remained when he finished; his disappointment with Bellow's character flaws (such as Bellow's tendency to portray himself as a blameless victim and his stubbornly anachronistic attitude toward women) is palpable. But his criticism of Bellow the man is always measured, and it has the nice effect of placing some of the more unsavory elements of Bellow's fiction in a kind of context. Bellow might not inspire a complete rethinking of Bellow's work, but it's a compelling reminder of its many pleasures. --John Ponyicsanyi


From Library Journal
Atlas took on the difficult Delmore Schwartz and got a National Book Award nomination for this troubles. Now he takes on Bellow. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
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. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“A most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a great American novelist.” —Michael Holroyd

“James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly informed history of one of America’s most original and gifted writers and a mythos of the artist’s life in the twentieth century. . . . As fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow’s arresting fictional characters.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“Like a sparring partner, James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in and out of Bellow’s extravagant life and extraordinary novels with great dexterity.” —Michael Holroyd


Review
?A most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a great American novelist.? ?Michael Holroyd

?James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly informed history of one of America?s most original and gifted writers and a mythos of the artist?s life in the twentieth century. . . . As fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow?s arresting fictional characters.? ?Joyce Carol Oates

?Like a sparring partner, James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in and out of Bellow?s extravagant life and extraordinary novels with great dexterity.? ?Michael Holroyd


Book Description
With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’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.

Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history.

Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein.


From the Inside Flap
With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’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.

Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history.

Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein.


From the Back Cover
“A most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a great American novelist.” —Michael Holroyd

“James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly informed history of one of America’s most original and gifted writers and a mythos of the artist’s life in the twentieth century. . . . As fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow’s arresting fictional characters.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“Like a sparring partner, James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in and out of Bellow’s extravagant life and extraordinary novels with great dexterity.” —Michael Holroyd


About the Author
James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, 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, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and of a novel, The Great Pretender.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
        I was, in 1937, a very young, married man who had quickly lost his first job and who lived with his in-laws. His affectionate, loyal, and pretty wife insisted that he must be given a chance to write something."

        But what? In "Starting Out in Chicago," originally delivered as a Brandeis commencement address in 1974, Saul Bellow provided a memorable portrait of his beginnings as a writer. If the year is wrong--it was 1938, just a year before the outbreak of World War II in Europe--the details are painfully accurate. This brief memoir, more than anything else he ever wrote, captures the early stage of that momentous confrontation in which "American society and S. Bellow came face to face." He was twenty-two years old.
        
        The job he'd lost was a stint in his older brother Maurice's coalyard, and he was fired for absenteeism. Maurice, not unreasonably, expected his brother to keep regular hours; Bellow had other ideas about how to spend his time: He wanted to write.

        His in-laws' apartment on North Virginia Avenue in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Ravenswood was drab and anonymous, one of the thousands of identical brick dwellings that sprawled mile upon mile across a dull, orderly grid of streets. While his wife, Anita, attended classes at the School of Social Service Administration at the university, Bellow sat at a bridge table in the back bedroom:

My table faced three cement steps that rose from the cellar into the brick gloom of a passageway. Only my mother-in-law was at home. A widow, then in her seventies [actually, her mid-sixties], she wore a heavy white braid down her back. She had been a modern woman and a socialist and suffragette in the old country. She was attractive in a fragile, steely way. You felt Sophie's [Sonya's] strength of will in all things. She kept a neat house. The very plants, the ashtrays, the pedestals, the doilies, the chairs, revealed her mastery. Each object had its military place. Her apartment could easily have been transferred to West Point.

Lunch occurred at half past twelve. The cooking was good. We ate together in the kitchen. The meal was followed by an interval of stone. My mother-in-law took a nap. I went into the street. Ravenswood was utterly empty. I walked about with something like a large stone in my belly. I often turned into Lawrence Avenue and stood on the bridge looking into the drainage canal. If I had been a dog I would have howled.


        American writers are largely self-made. William Faulkner emerged out of the somnolent town of Oxford, Mississippi; Ernest Hemingway was brought up in the bland suburb of Oak Park, just a few miles from Ravenswood; Sinclair Lewis hailed from Sauk Centre, Minnesota. They simply "materialized somehow," as Bellow put it. But even by the folkloric standards of American literature, Bellow's remoteness from the centers of culture was extreme. "Bernanos, the French religious novelist, said that his soul could not bear to be cut off from its kind, and that was why he did his work in cafés," Bellow noted enviously: "Cafés indeed! I would have kissed the floor of a café. There were no cafés in Chicago. There were greasy-spoon cafeterias, one-arm joints, taverns. I never yet heard of a writer who broughthis manuscripts into a tavern."

        Over the years, he collected a virtual anthology of disparaging observations that visitors had made about the city: Oscar Wilde found the Water Tower, one of the few buildings to survive the great Chicago fire of 1871, an offense against good taste; "he was amazed that people could so abuse Gothic art." Rudyard Kipling was appalled by the Palmer House, "a gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere." Edmund Wilson was oppressed by the canyons of La Salle Street: "In the morning, the winter sun does not seem to give any light: it leaves the streets dull. It is more like a forge which has just been started up, and is beginning to burn red in an atmosphere darkened by coal-fumes."

        It would have been hard to deny the truth of what they saw: Culture in Chicago was a marginal enterprise. Dominated by the brute forces of industry, by stockyards and farm-machinery works and automobile assembly lines, it was the city, in Sandburg's famous line, of "big shoulders." Yet it was also true that Chicago possessed an indigenous literature. In the decades just before and after 1900, novels by Chicago writers crowded the shelves: Frank Norris's The Pit (1903), about wheat speculators on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade; Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), about a young lady from Nebraska who came to study music in the city; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), a raw depiction of the harsh existence of a Lithuanian immigrant family in the South Side stockyards; Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood trilogy, based on the career of Charles T. Yerkes, the Chicago railroad financier; the works of Sherwood Anderson. The Chicago Renaissance was a fact. "Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way," H. L. Mencken declared, "and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan."

        What nineteenth-century Paris had been to Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of Balzac's Lost Illusions, twentieth-century Chicago was to young men and women from Terre Haute or Valparaiso: "the place," wrote Bellow, "the incredible, vital, sinful, fascinating big city." If there were no cafés, there was still a tremendous concentration of vivid private experience--evidence, Bellow contended in his memoir, "that the life lived in great manufacturing, shipping, and banking centers, with their slaughter stink, their great slums, prisons, hospitals, and schools, was also a human life." Milton Friedman, who brought honor to the university by winning a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 (the same year that Bellow won in literature), has speculated that the city's reputation for nurturing literary and intellectual talent can be traced to the same geographical centrality that made it a great industrial power. Chicago, Friedman noted, was "a new, raw city bursting with energy, far less sophisticated than New York, but for that very reason far more tolerant of diversity, of heterodox ideas." New York looked east, to the Old World. Chicago looked west, to the frontier--in effect, inventing its own frontiers.

        This energy was the catalyst of Bellow's art. In his hands, the city would become a character in its own right, the center of both his life and his work. The shelf of books he produced over the course of a career sustained for more than half a century was to make "Bellow's Chicago" as familiar a locale in literature as Joyce's Dublin. It wasn't an achievement that his circumstances preordained; the absence of encouragement, of community, of any plausible way to make a living would have provoked a person far sturdier than Bellow to despair. But he was armored against disappointment by a stubborn belief in his destiny--a belief he maintained in the absence of both proof and reason. The sociologist Edward Shils, for many years his colleague at the University of Chicago and one of the most incisive interpreters of his character, noted, "For Bellow, an artist was the same as being a saint, an 'unacknowledged legislator of mankind,' one who was consecrated to the highest function of which any human being is capable, namely, to be an artist." It was a belief that enabled him to prevail.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’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.

Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history.

Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Atlas's chronicle of Saul Bellow's life contains all the excess of contemporary literary biography. Yet, in the midst of the recordings of Bellow's arrogance, sexual insatiability, and peevish complaints to publishers and friends, Atlas provides a portrait of an exceptional writer who has immeasurably enriched American literature. Enlivening his narrative with interviews, letters, and reviews of the novelist's work, Atlas (Delmore Schwartz) traces Bellow's life from his birth in 1915 through his student years to his mature development as a novelist. Although Bellow's first two novels had disappointing sales, his dogged belief that he was meant to be a writer and his fiery persistence resulted in The Adventures of Augie March, which won him his first National Book Award and was hailed by many as the "great American novel." With remarkable critical acumen, Atlas engages in close readings of Bellow's novels, providing glimpses of the ways in which the novelist's art and life have often mirrored one another. Atlas also generously covers Bellow's relationships with Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, and many other icons in American literary history. This exceptional and definitive chronicle of the life and work of one of our most eminent men of letters is highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/00.]--Henry Carrigan, Lancaster, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

James Kaplan - New York Observer

A magnificent new biography...this is the book [Atlas] was born to write. He is, quite simply, the right guy for the (very big)....no matter how tuckered-out Saul Bellow may be in his mid '80's, he hasn't lost his edge.

John Leonard - New York Times Book Review

However confounded, a biographer more scrupulous than Atlas is hard to imagine. He has been on the case like a federal marshal for more than a decade. A hoary old reviewer's scam is to pretend you already knew all the inside stuff before you ever read the biography you're about to quibble with by poaching from. Let me be upfront: Almost everything I know about Bellow that I didn't guess from reading him, I got from the encyclopedic Atlas.... I could no more stop reading his biography than I could stop reading Saul Bellow after he blew the blinds off the windows in my head.

James Shapiro - New York Times

Bellow is not only a compelling story of a great and flawed writer, one who continues to demand our attention, but also a portrait of an extraordinary (and now rapidly receding) epoch in the history of American letters.

Logan Hill - New York Magazine

From the marriages to the feuds to three National Book Awards and the Nobel Prize, the pages just fly by.Read all 7 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly informed history of one of America's most original and gifted writers and a mythos of the artist's life in the perilous twentieth century. His Bellow is seen, heard, felt, assessed; intelligently and sympathetically viewed from a number of perspectives; as fascinating a portrait as nay of Bellow's arresting ficitonal characters. — Joyce Carol Oates

Saul Bellow is a man of profound gifts and potent charm: a considerable challenge to any biographer. Like a sparring partner. James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in and out of Bellow's extravagant life, his extraordinary novels, with great dexterity. It is a most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a great American novelist. — Michael Holroyd