The first major biography of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow.

Shortlisted for Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2016.

"Zachary Leader's Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 is already the equal of Richard Ellmann's great Life of Joyce. The first instalment is scrupulous, dispassionate, morally sensitive, profoundly informative and marvellously acute in its literary judgements. It's a miracle of lucidly marshalled detail." -- Craig Raine, Books of the Year Times Literary Supplement "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 is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of Reading Blake's Songs, Writer's Block, Revision and Romantic Authorship and The Life of Kingsley Amis. Among the books he has edited are The Letters of Kingsley Amis and On Modern British Fiction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.