Saul Bellow's Heart

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.

“Saul Bellow’s Heart is a fascinating personal document written with much sympathy, yet an admirable candor, by Bellow’s eldest son Gregory, a psychotherapist. It is a portrait of the artist at close quarters, and at a little distance; a confirmation of the deep autobiographical roots of Bellow’s fiction; and a revelation of what it means to be the child, in this case one of three sons, of the most lavishly acclaimed American writer of the second half of the twentieth century.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“Saul Bellow was an incandescent being, and also incandescently difficult. Greg Bellow has written a wrenchingly candid account of being his son—a real son, not a literary son: there is no self-invention here, there is only self-discovery. I was deeply moved by Greg Bellow’s memoir of his passage from pain to acceptance. Amid the brutalities of love he has found its blessing.” —Leon Wieseltier