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A deeply considered and provocative new look at major American writersincluding Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and W.H. AudenEdward Mendelsons Moral Agents is also a work of critical biography in the great tradition of Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. Any important writer, in Mendelsons view, writes in response to an idea of the good life that is inseparable from the life the writer lives. Fusing biography and criticism and based on extensive new research, Moral Agents presents challenging new portraits of eight writersnovelists, critics, and poetswho transformed American literature in the turbulent twentieth century. Eight sharply distinctive individualsinspired, troubled, hugely ambitiouswho reimagined what it means to be a writer. Theres Saul Bellow, a novelist determined to rule as a patriarch, who, having been neglected by his father, in turn neglected his son in favor of young writers who presented themselves as his literary heirs.