The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 2: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 [Paperback]

The second volume in the life of literary giant Saul Bellow, vividly capturing a personal life that was always tumultuous and career that never ceased being triumphant.

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 in the latter half of his life some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift), 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 the first. 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.

In this stunning second volume, Zachary Leader shows that Bellow's heroic energy and will were present to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, continue to be worth the examination of this vivid work of literary scholarship.“Since Saul Bellow--along with William Faulkner--constitutes the sturdy backbone of 20th century American literature, a biography as lavishly detailed and craftily organized as Mr. Leader's is a necessary addition to the library of major biographies of our strongest writers. Despite Bellow's every effort to find order and serenity in which to do his work, his life, as it is meticulously presented here, was no less wild and original than his novels , a turbulence of crises that might have killed him had they not been magically transfigured  by a prose style as rich and roiling as Melville's into one of the liveliest, brainiest collections of vivid American fiction that is ours to tlcK