Life of Saul Bellow

About the book

Literature Book of the Year, Sunday Times

'Terrific' Guardian
'Enthralling' Spectator
'Magisterial' Daily Telegraph
'Unsurpassable' New York Review of Books

By the time Herzog was published in 1964, Saul Bellow was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America, described in later years by the critic James Wood as 'the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century.' Zachary Leader's biography shows how this prose, with its exhilarating mixture of high culture and low, came into existence. It also traces Bellow's life away from the desk, as polemicist, teacher, husband, father and lover. Fierce in his loyalties, Bellow was no less fierce in his enmities, combative in defence of his...