Saul Bellow was the most decorated writer in American history, the winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Life of Saul Bellow by the acclaimed scholar and literary historian Zachary Leader will mark the centenary of Bellow’s birth as well as the tenth anniversary of his death. Leader has been granted unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material. He has conducted interviews with over 150 of Bellow’s relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow’s writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist’s development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities—as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, American, Jew.

The biography is published in two volumes. The first volume, To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, traces Bellow’s Russian roots, his birth and early childhood in Quebec, his years in Chicago, his travels in Mexico, Europe, and Israel, the first three of his five marriages, and the novels from Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March to the best-selling Herzog. New light is shed on Bellow’s relationships with fellow writers, including Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Philip Roth, and Lionel Trilling, and on his turbulent and influential life away from the desk, as full of incident as his fiction. Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader’s powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, ‘the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century.’