FOR sharing their memories of Saul Bellow with me and giving me generous permission to draw on them in this book, I would like to thank Max Apple, Adam Bellow, Daniel Bellow, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow, Jonathan Brent, Stanley Crouch, Maggie Staats Simmons, Joan Ullman, and Leon Wieseltier. I also want to thank my hosts at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought in May 2015, when I presented a talk drawn from this book: Rosanna Warren, Robert Pippin, Nathan Tarcov, and David Wellbery. Their comments have improved the book substantially. The special collections division of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago kindly assisted me during my consultation of the Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Tarcov family collections.
My editor, Matt Weiland, and his assistant, Sam MacLaughlin, at Norton have been a tremendous help with the writing of this book; I am grateful for their hard work and their insight. Thanks go as well to Laura Goldin and Remy Cawley at Norton, to David LaRocca for help with the notes, and to Trent Duffy for copyediting. My agent, Chris Calhoun, deserves special thanks for his belief in this project.
In this book I have relied extensively on four essential earlier volumes: James Atlas’s Bellow, Benjamin Taylor’s Saul Bellow: Letters and his edition of Bellow’s essays, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, and Zachary Leader’s To Fame and Fortune: The Life of Saul Bellow, 1915–1964. Ben Taylor and Zach Leader have shared their knowledge of Saul Bellow with me both informally and at a panel held at Columbia University in the fall of 2015; I wish to thank the organizer of that panel, Ross Posnock. My editors at Tablet magazine, David Samuels and Matthew Fishbane, and at the Nation, John Palatella, and at the Yale Review, J. D. McClatchy, gave me the chance to write about Bellow, for which I am also grateful. All three publications have given kind permission to reprint passages from these pieces in Bellow’s People.
The Houstoun Endowment at the University of Houston helped pay for permissions costs, as did the Dean’s Office of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.