Yet there’s something odd about the way this biography proceeds. Leader relies on external sources for the basic facts of Bellow’s life but fills them in with Bellow’s own words. Family members recount stories about Bellow’s father, Abraham, who was bad at business, but most of the details about his professional failures at farming, baking, and bootlegging come from Bellow. (Abraham finally made it in the coal business, with the help of his older sons.) And we come to know Abraham as a man—physically abusive but loving; part tyrant, part schlemiel; a big, melodramatic, almost vaudevillian personality stuck in his Old World Yiddishkeit—almost entirely through descriptions of the fathers in Herzog and Bellow’s most autobiographical work, the never-finished Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son, from which Leader generously quotes. “You see what die Mama and I have gone through to keep coats on your backs and shoes on your feet and bring you up as Jews and not as enemies of Jews,” Bellow has his father say in Memoirs. The narrator then offers this cold-eyed commentary: “When Pa spoke such things in his whisper, wide-eyed, he bent his knees—his body sank a little, he swayed it sidewards … He behaved like a painted man on the stage in the role of a poor Jew.”

We read a few pages about Humboldt Park, where Bellow spent much of his childhood, but see Chicago as marked by “an unreasonable kind of emptiness,” largely void of beauty “unless you had the gift of deeper perception,” because that’s how Bellow saw it. We perceive his mother, Liza—a relatively well-off merchant’s daughter turned worn-out housewife—as “the source of all human connectedness” because Bellow felt unconditionally loved by her: “When you fell down the stairs and got a big bump on your head,” he once said in an interview, “her crying aloud and solicitude made you feel that you were—it never even entered your mind that you were anything but—cherished.”

The urge to poach such vivid portraiture must have been hard to resist, and Leader’s borrowings provide an excellent introduction to Bellow’s world. But they also pose an epistemological problem. Biography by way of empathetic identification works when we don’t know how a subject experienced his life, but Bellow shared that information in abundance. What we don’t know are the things he wouldn’t or couldn’t reveal, and what we crave is a wider view than his one-point perspective allows us.

Leader does step back to reconsider one crucial subject. The rap against Bellow is that he maligned four of his five wives, especially in his fiction. This is true, and Leader is savvy enough not to take Bellow’s word about them. Wife No. 1, Anita, is shown as the underappreciated mainstay she obviously was. As for wife No. 2, Sondra Tschacbasov Bellow (Bellow called her Sasha), the model for the evil Madeleine, Leader has a scoop: an unpublished memoir shared with him after Bellow’s death. By her own account, Sasha was a vulnerable child-woman lacking basic life skills. From childhood and into her teens, she says, she was the victim of incest committed by her father. When Bellow took up with her, he was 37 and she was 21, a Bennington graduate and a secretary at the Partisan Review. His friends treated her with a sniggering sexism unfortunately unremarkable in the 1950s. At a party Bellow took her to, the critic R. W. B. Lewis, her former professor, drunkenly demanded to know whether she was sleeping with Bellow yet; “they were all placing bets.” She started an affair with Bellow’s friend Jack Ludwig (the prototype for Gersbach in Herzog) only after she learned of her husband’s many infidelities.