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Zusatztext “A most accomplished performance! and a fascinating account of a great American novelist.” — Michael Holroyd “James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the conversational ease of a born storyteller! giving us both a richly informed history of one of America’s most original and gifted writers and a mythos of the artist’s life in the twentieth century. . . . As fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow’s arresting fictional characters.” — Joyce Carol Oates “Like a sparring partner! James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in and out of Bellow’s extravagant life and extraordinary novels with great dexterity.” — Michael Holroyd Informationen zum Autor James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair , 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 , and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet , which was nominated for the National Book Award, and of a novel, The Great Pretender . Klappentext With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize-winning author's turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events—the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties—and 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 Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein. Leseprobe 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 of streets. While his wife, Anita, attended classes at the School of Social Service Administration at the university, Bellow sat at a bridge table in the back bedroom: My table faced three cement steps that rose from the cellar into the brick gloom of a passageway. ...
