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Brigge. (“When I find a writer like that he generally turns into a kind of underground song whose voice I hear all the time, day and night.”) Begins work on novel The Notebook of a Dangling Man.
     
    1943 Fails to win Guggenheim Fellowship. Whittaker Chambers rejects his application for employment as film reviewer at Time. Gets part-time job at Encyclopaedia Britannica . (“Isaac Rosenfeld said that it cost less than a thousand dollars a year to be poor—you could make it on seven or eight hundred.”) Excerpt from novel in progress appears in Partisan Review . Is draft-deferred a third time.
     
    1944 Dangling Man published by James Henle at Vanguard Press on March 23, 1944; praised by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker as “one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the Depression and the war.” Anita gives birth to son Gregory in April. Henry Volkening, co-founder of literary agency Russell & Volkening, acting now as Bellow’s agent.
     
    1945 Accepted into Merchant Marine. Posted to Atlantic headquarters at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Following Japanese surrender, released to inactive status. Begins work on next novel, The Victim , “a story of guilt,” as he proposes it.
    1946 Second application for Guggenheim Fellowship unsuccessful. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, hires him as assistant professor of English. Among senior colleagues is Robert Penn Warren, who will be lifelong friend. Also comes to know Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis.
     
    1947 First trip to Europe: Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Granada. The Victim published in November by Vanguard. (“In writing The Victim I accepted a Flaubertian standard. Not a bad standard, to be sure, but one which, in the end, I found repressive [ . . . ] A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form which frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be ‘correct’? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker ? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin.”)
     
    1948-49 Receives Guggenheim Fellowship. Publishes “Spanish Letter” in Partisan Review . Breaking with Vanguard Press, goes to Viking; Monroe Engel is his editor. Journeys with Anita and Gregory to Paris, their home for next two years. American friends and acquaintances there include Mary McCarthy, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, Herbert Gold, James Baldwin and Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, friend from early Chicago days. Through Kappy, meets Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Czeslaw Milosz and Nicola Chiaromonte. Develops strong distaste for French intellectual life: “One of the things that was clear to me when I went to Paris on a Guggenheim grant was that Les Temps Modernes understood less about Marxism and left-wing politics than I had understood as a high-school boy.” Embarks on new work, The Crab and the Butterfly , then stalls. One spring morning while watching sanitation sweepers opening hydrants and sunlit water sparkling in gutters, resolves to write different sort of novel. (“I had walked away from the street-washing crew saying under my breath, ‘I am an American—Chicago-born.’ The ‘I’ in this case was not autobiographical. I had in mind a boyhood friend from Augusta Street in Chicago of the mid-Twenties. I hadn’t seen Augie since the late Twenties; the Forties were now ending. What had become of my friend, I couldn’t say. It struck me that a fictional biography of this impulsive, handsome, intelligent, spirited boy would certainly be worth writing. Augie had introduced me to the American language and the charm of that language was one of the charms of his personality. From him I had unwittingly learned to go at things free-style, making the record in my own way—first to knock, first