The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964
by zachary leader
knopf, 832 pages, $40
Saul Bellow had a cat named Rufus. He learned from Ralph Ellison how to make drip coffee—though, according to his new biographer, the “elaborate procedure” that Ellison taught him “was hard to see as worth the effort.” Also meriting attention in Zachary Leader’s 800-page chronicle of the first half of Bellow’s life: the incorporation in 2002 of Bellow’s birthplace, Lachine, Quebec, into the city of Montreal. In his sophomore year of high school, Bellow’s grades were mostly “Good” or “Excellent.” The father of Bellow’s third wife, Susan, was a doctor for the Chicago Bears and Blackhawks. One of Bellow’s colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought gave another of his colleagues a silver marrow spoon at Christmas one year, and one of Bellow’s writing students went on to pen the screenplay for Dirty Dancing. I could go on with these pocket lint pearls. Leader certainly does.
