Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir

In this warm, affectionate, yet strikingly honest look inside the life of one of America’s greatest 20th century writers, his father the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, Greg Bellow offers a view no one else has of a man known to be quick to anger, prone to argument, politically conservative, and palpably vulnerable to criticism. Yet there was a bond of tender emotion between Saul Bellow and Greg, his firstborn.

In Saul Bellow’s Heart, Greg Bellow gives voice to a side of Saul unknown to most others, the Young Saul-emotionally accessible, often soft, with a set of egalitarian social values and the ability to laugh at the world’s folly and himself; rebellious, irreverent, and ambitious.Saul’s accessibility and lightheartedness waned as he aged, and his social views hardened.This is the Old Saul most known to the world, and these changes taxed the relationship between Bellow and his son so sorely that Greg often worried whether it would survive. But theirs were differences of mind, not of heart.Interweaving stories based on autobiographical references in Saul’s books that only he might recognize, Greg Bellow reveals himself to be a fine prose stylist, never shying away from the truth. In Saul Bellow’s Heart, he has written a memoir that gives equal weight to the rebellious, irreverent, and ambitious young writer who raised him, and the older literary giant, famous and fiercely private.