Bellow
by James Atlas
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Description
"Saul Bellow's parents fled Russia in 1913 and settled with relatives in Canada, where Saul was born. Bellow's boyhood in Quebec and Chicago, marked by his family's transient existence and struggle for economic survival (his father was a bootlegger for a time), provided inspiration for many of the memorable characters and scenes that animate his fiction. It was in Chicago that Bellow came into his own, discovering his unique voice and encountering many of the women, as well as the writers show more and intellectuals, who were to populate his novels and his life. Atlas draws upon Bellow's vast correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries in this rich and revealing account of one writer's experience of America's twentieth-century intellectual and literary history."--Jacket. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Perhaps the best biography that I have read. Bellow provides a life full of stories and challenges and Atlas matches his wit and verve. While it is natural to find something at odds with a piece of scholarship such as this, I will reserve my comments for admiration and respect.
Che cosa è più appassionante : i romanzi o la vita? Difficile a dirsi...
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Author Information
12+ Works 673 Members
James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series, a joint venture of Penguin and Lipper Books that he conceived around 1996 as he was struggling with his Bellow biography. His idea was to pair well-known writers and biographical subjects, with the books to be 150 pages or so, short for the genre. A longtime contributor show more to The New Yorker, 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, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for a National Book Award. James Atalas passed away on September 4, 2019 at the age of 70. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Bellow
- People/Characters
- Saul Bellow
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 195
- Popularity
- 168,636
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.61)
- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 8
- ASINs
- 4
