Bellow A Biography [Paperback]

USJames Atlasis the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor toThe New YorkerandVanity Fair, he was an editor atThe New York Times Magazinefor many years. His work has appeared inThe New York Times Book Review,The New York Review of Books, and many other journals. He is the author ofDelmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and of a novel,The Great Pretender.        I was, in 1937, a very young, married man who had quickly lost his first job and who lived with his in-laws. His affectionate, loyal, and pretty wife insisted that he must be given a chance to write something."

        But what? In "Starting Out in Chicago," originally delivered as a Brandeis commencement address in 1974, Saul Bellow provided a memorable portrait of his beginnings as a writer. If the year is wrong--it was 1938, just a year before the outbreak of World War II in Europe--the details are painfully accurate. This brief memoir, more than anything else he ever wrote, captures the early stage of that momentous confrontation in which "American society and S. Bellow came face to face." He was twenty-two years old.
        
        The job he'd lost was a stint in his older brother Maurice's coalyard, and he was fired for absenteeism. Maurice, not unreasonably, expected his brother to keep regular hours; Bellow had other ideas about how to spend his time: He wanted to write.

        His in-laws' apartment on North Virginia Avenue in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Ravenswood was drab and anonymous, one of the thousands of identical brick dwellings that sprawled mile upon mile across a dull, orderly grid olóµ