The second volume of Zachary Leader's definitive authorised biography of one of the greatest American writers
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.
Leader is our hyper-sensitive ammeter, charting the myriad effects
of all this fame on his difficult, brilliant subject. A great feat
of scholarship and, at the end, a moving testament to one of the
last century’s greatest writers.
*Sunday Times, **Literary Book of the Year***
This will stand as the definitive account. Leader talked to the
surviving three wives and drew on the memories of Bellow’s three
sons, as well as more than 100 friends (and one or two enemies) and
devout literary progeny including Martin Amis and the critic James
Wood.
*Observer*
This second volume of biography perfectly captures the spirit of a
complex genius… Bellow calls for a sensitive balance between
censure and understanding, to avoid overshadowing his genius, and
it is hard to imagine anyone doing it better [than Zachary
Leader].
*Evening Standard *Book of the Week**
Zachary Leader’s monumental biography of Saul Bellow…[is] minutely
researched and clear-eyed… Leader is wholly steeped in Bellow’s
oeuvre and able to find all the fictional equivalents of the real
people who filled his life.
*Guardian*
Leader’s portrait manages to be both subtle and even-handed…
Leader’s two-volume biography is an astonishingly detailed and
thoughtful record of an important life.
*Spectator*
As a friend to Saul and as an awestruck admirer of his astonishing
work, I was not always at ease reading portions of this painfully
intimate biography. Nonetheless, the book's sweep and majesty –
like that of its subject – are not to be denied. All the personal
strife is there, the controversies and the disasters, his magical
power of observation, that intellect, along with a meticulous
record of how, with what labor – the peasant doggedness and the
meticulous workmanship and the grinding patience and the hard won
inspiration – the great novels came to be written.
*Philip Roth*
In the second and final volume of his meticulously objective
biography… [Leader] gives us all the information from every angle,
rewarding the patient reader with a multi-dimensional portrait of
this contradictory, conflicted, brilliant, difficult human being
[Saul Bellow]. And although this is a big book, it’s actually a
miracle of compression and clarity, given the size of the life.
Best of all, Leader always makes time to remind us why we’re here:
for the work itself, which he quotes from generously and with
relish.
*Spectator **Books of the Year***
Leader’s biography is a monumental piece of scholarship… It is also
thrilling to read… With this enthralling, massively detailed book,
Leader has not laid Bellow bare so much as enriched him.
*Literary Review*
Leader’s work… will almost certainly become a prism through which
his subject is seen from now on… a monument to this iconic figure’s
legacy. Exhaustive, respectful, essential.
*Jewish Chronicle*
[A] magnificently researched book... highly informative...
admirable.
*The Times*
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