Bellow A Biography

With this masterly and original work,Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prizewinning author's turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century eventsthe Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixtiesand amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, which generated a vibrant new literature. Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow's extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history. Detailing Bellow's volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends,Bellow: A Biographyis a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works includeHerzog,The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently,Ravelstein.

<b>James Atlas</b> is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor to <i>The New Yorker</i> and <i>Vanity Fair</i>, he was an editor at <i>The New York Times Magazine</i> for many years. His work has appeared in <i>The New York Times Book Review</i>, <i>The New York Review of Books</i>, and many other journals. He is the author of <i>Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet</i>, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and of a novel, <i>The Great Pretender</i>.