Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination

A longtime friend of Saul Bellow tracks the novelist's life, examines his work's often critical reception, and studies the interplay between Bellow's life and his creation of fiction

This fan letter disguised as literary history offers a generally solid introduction to Bellow's life and work. Miller, an adjunct professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was among the novelist's early students, later becoming a friend and (in Bellow's words) a close "intellectual companion." In tracing Bellow's development from aspiring writer to Nobel laureate, Miller draws on their correspondence, unpublished manuscripts in the Bellow archives (to which she enjoyed unlimited access) and her own lengthy interpretations of his works. The devotee painstakingly notes the autobiographical elements in her subject's corpus--furnishing accounts of his tortured family life--and presents the Bellow novel as a "peripatetic journey through events that are long past and among people who are lost to him." But in chronicling the writer's ongoing literary development, Miller loses objectivity; using novels, letters, speeches and private conversations to let "Bellow speak in his own voice about himself," she allows this to become, at times, a biography with a one-sided, excessively personal view.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is no dispassionate work of literary criticism but rather an effort "to interpret the progress of the writer from the time he first appeared in print to his most recent publication, taking into account especially the initial reception that greeted each work." Miller, Bellow's friend for 50 years, discusses his novels, short stories, plays, essays, lectures, interviews, and speeches, emphasizing the struggle and hard work that have led to Bellow's acclaim. What distinguishes this book is Miller's point of view. Using her journal entries to record countless informal conversations, she peppers her unique account with personal vignettes of Bellow, whom she sometimes calls Saul. Her high regard of her subject is never hidden. Recommended for large collections.
-John Miller, Normandale Community Coll., Bloomington, Minn.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.