But with Bellow's National Book Award-winning breakthrough with "Augie March," his third novel, the walls to the great American readership, to the book clubs and college reading lists, were breached. Bellow had knocked, not so innocently, and the reading public not only answered but proceeded, over the course of the next two decades, to give him, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth a regular place on the bedside reading table.

Nearly half a century since his breakthrough, and almost 25 years since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Bellow is the subject of a new biography by James Atlas, a New Yorker writer and author of an acclaimed biography of Partisan poet Delmore Schwartz. Atlas writes in the introduction to the new book that he had originally expected to tackle the life of man of letters Edmund Wilson, but found himself in a dry hole five years after signing the contract for the book. "I had a toxic response to [Wilson's] character," he writes. "The bullying proclamations, the tedious self-revelations, the drinking and philandering -- in the end, he just didn't appeal to me as a subject to whose life and work I was willing to apprentice myself for the better part of a decade." Instead, partly at Roth's urging, Atlas set out on a 10-year project to chronicle Bellow's bullying proclamations, tedious self-revelations and (relatively alcohol-free) philandering.

Over the past few weeks, Atlas has taken multiple hits from critics on both sides of the Atlantic, who have accused him of placing undue emphasis on Bellow's narcissistic, arrogant traits. Atlas is not, unfortunately, the sort of writer who can take a wry view of the disparity between Bellow's moralistic tone in his writings of the past few decades and the novelist's own less than admirable behavior. The same nature whose reaction to Wilson's faults reached toxic levels is at work here, and the chemistry is apparent. Yet it seems impossible that any biographer could examine Bellow without displaying some aversion to some of his behavior, and to the moral lecturing made hollow by those deeds. Atlas has also been accused of tracing the real-life sources of certain of Bellow's characters in a ham-handed way, but this is also a dubious charge. There has not been a writer since James Joyce who has reveled like Bellow in the real-life connections to his fictional characters. That Atlas spends a large amount of his time tracking down these models is true, but what reader would not want to know these sources, fragmentary as they must surely be? Atlas' main crime in the eyes of his critics seems to be felony-level failure to rhapsodize. To all but card-carrying fan club members, this is an offense to be welcomed.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"