Here is Saul Bellow describing Chicago at its worst: "On winter afternoons . . . the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter's power of shrinking your face . . ." Bellow himself was whipsawed, time and again, over his long career between critical acclaim and blasts as ferocious as the winds off Chicago's brutal, gorgeous lake.

The gap between critical appraisal and character assassination was often paper-thin. Mark Harris built an entire book, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck, around the mystifying conceit that he was a rodent ("a woodchuck is very smart. A woodchuck has the sense to hide.") In Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, Ruth Miller, an ex-student and discarded lover, explained Bellow's politics as the result of bad parenting. James Atlas' massive and influential Bellow: A Biography was the product of a great deal of labor and not inconsiderable bile (as a biographer, Atlas seems to have aspired to the headhunter's power too). Bellow was reduced to a crabbed man, as vain as a movie star and as promiscuous as an alley cat. One gets little sense from Atlas of how his subject produced indispensable novel after novel, except to the extent (admittedly always large for Bellow) that they were quarried from his hopelessly messy life. 

Of course, Bellow was graced with many gushes of warm wind too: relatively early acclaim, close literary friendships that were surprisingly free of rancor and envy (though Bellow was entirely capable of both), and, eventually, every award including the Nobel Prize. One of his great literary friends, Philip Roth, wrote as lovingly astute a summation of his his career as has been written about any American writer of the last century. In "Rereading Bellow," Roth focused, as have so many others, on Bellow's voice, his sentence-by-sentence genius, as it burst forth in his first great book:

         Engorged sentences had existed before in American fiction—notably in Melville and Faulkner—but not
         quite like those in Augie March, which strike me as more liberty-taking . . . There are sentences in the
         book whose effervescence, whose undercurrent of buoyancy leave one with the sense of so much going
         on, a theatrical, exhibitionist, ardent prose tangle that lets in the dynamism of living without driving
         mentalness out. This voice no longer encountering resistance is permeated by mind while connected
         also to the mysteries of feeling. It's a voice unbridled and intelligent both, going at full force and yet
         always sharp enough to sensibly size things up.

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