The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005

About this book

When this second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow opens Bellow at forty-nine is at the pinnacle of American letters - rich famous critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1 rise; volume 2 fall. Bellow never fell producing some of his greatest fiction (Mr Sammlers Planet Humboldts Gift all his best stories) winning two more National Book Awards a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. At eighty he wrote his last story; at eighty-five he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume his life away from the desk including his love life is if anything more dramatic than in volume 1. In the public sphere he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs race religion education social policy the state of culture the fate of the novel. Bellows relations with women were often fraught. In the 1960s he was compulsively promiscuous (even as he inveighed against sexual liberation). The women he pursued the ones he married and those with whom he had affairs were intelligent attractive and strong-willed. At eighty-five he fathered his fourth child a daughter with his fifth wife. His three sons whom he loved could be as volatile as he was and their relations with their father were often troubled. Although an early and engaged supporter of civil rights in the second half of his life Bellow was angered by the excesses of Black Power. An opponent of cultural relativism he exercised great influence in literary and intellectual circles advising a host of institutes and foundations helping those he approved of hindering those of whom he disapproved. In making his case he could be cutting and rude; he could also be charming loyal and funny. Bellows heroic energy and will are clear to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost to himself and others are also clear.