Zachary Leader Books

Professor Leader marks the centenary of Bellow's birth with an account of the novelist's life. The biography will be published in two volumes.

The Movement was the preeminent poetical grouping of post-war Britain. This collection of original essays by distinguished poets, critics, and scholars from Britain and America provides new accounts not only of the best-known of Movement writers - Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, and Donald Davie - but of less-familiar contemporaries.

The eagerly-awaited authorized biography of Kingsley Amis. In this, the authorized biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but the dominant figure of post-war British writing. Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on almost a thousand previously unpublished letters, Leader’s biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis’s childhood, school-days, life as a teacher, critic, polemicist, professional author, husband, father and lover. He explores Amis’s fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis’s work. As the editor of Kingsley Amis’s Letters (hailed in the Sunday Telegraph as “one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art”), Leader is more than qualified to be his authorized biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.

In the second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow, Bellow, at forty-nine, stands at the peak of American literature—wealthy, celebrated, and critically lauded. Contrary to the expected decline, he continued to produce remarkable works, including Mr. Sammler's Planet and Humboldt's Gift, while garnering two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. Even at eighty, he penned his last story and, at eighty-five, completed Ravelstein. This volume reveals a life outside his writing, with a love life that is even more dramatic than in the first. Publicly, he engaged in controversies surrounding foreign affairs, race, religion, and culture. His relationships with women were complex; in the 1960s, he was promiscuous despite criticizing sexual liberation. His partners were often intelligent and strong-willed. At eighty-five, he welcomed a daughter with his fifth wife, while his relationships with his three sons were often tumultuous. Although an early supporter of civil rights, he later criticized the excesses of Black Power. Bellow's influence in literary circles was significant, as he advised various institutes, often with a sharp tongue. His energy and will remained evident throughout his life, highlighting both his monumental achievements and their personal costs.