Saul Bellow as a character in his own psychodrama

Bellow

By James Atlas

Random House, 686 pages, $35; Modern Library, 686 pages, $16.95 paper

This wonderful biography traces the trajectory of Saul Bellow’s career and smartly establishes the relationship between his life and the fiction he created. Atlas, a Chicagoan of a generation following Bellow, captures the details of Bellow’s world–the world in which he was his own hero.