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Article: BELLOW: A BIOGRAPHY.(Review)
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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BELLOW: A BIOGRAPHY By James Atlas. Random House. $35.
James Atlas's long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow is at once indispensable and something of a disappointment--indispensable because of the mountains of new information it contains, and disappointing because of the reductive, often ungenerous portrait that emerges. As a minor character observes about the larky, picaresque protagonist of The Adventures of Augie March, "There's opposition in him." The same thing might be said of Bellow himself: he resisted the conventional wisdom about success parceled out first by his father and then by his well-heeled older brothers, and chose instead the riskier course of ...