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not have been a good thing to stand apart, but my character demanded it. It was inevitable—and the best way to treat the inevitable is to regard it as a good thing.”) At Bard, comes to know Irma Brandeis, Heinrich Blücher, Hannah Arendt, Theodore Hoffman, Anthony Hecht, Theodore Weiss, Keith Botsford and Jack Ludwig.
     
    1954 “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” in Discover . “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story” in The New York Times Book Review . “A Personal Record” (review of Joyce Cary’s Except the Lord ) in The New Republic . Receives National Book Award for Augie . Separates from Anita and resigns position at Bard. Spends summer at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where friends and acquaintances include Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy and Harvard professor Harry Levin.
     
    1955 Abram Bellow dies of aneurysm. (“[W]hen I wept at the funeral, my eldest brother said to me, ‘Don’t carry on like an immigrant!’ He had business friends there and he was ashamed of all this open emotionalism.”) Story “A Father-to-Be” in The New Yorker. Interviews “Yellow Kid” Weil, legendary Chicago con man, for The Reporter . Receives second Guggenheim Fellowship. “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them” in The New Republic . Establishes residence at Reno, Nevada, awaiting divorce.
     
    1956 In Reno, marries Sondra in February. Arthur Miller, awaiting his own divorce, settles into nearby bungalow with Marilyn Monroe. “Rabbi’s Boy in Edinburgh” (review of Two Worlds by David Daiches) in Saturday Review of Literature . At Yaddo in September, meets John Cheever, whom he will rank highest among contemporary American writers of fiction. With eight-thousand-dollar inheritance from father, buys ramshackle residence at Tivoli, New York. Teaches at the New School for Social Research. Seize the Day published in Partisan Review in November. (“I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of Seize the Day are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.”) “The University as Villain” in The Nation .
     
    1957 Sondra gives birth to son Adam in January. Bellow at work on new novel based freely on former Barrytown landlord Chanler Chapman. Teaches spring term at University of Minnesota, where Berryman is on faculty. In the Bellows’ absence, Ralph and Fanny Ellison living at Tivoli house. In May, visits Richard Stern’s writing seminar at University of Chicago where he meets twenty-four-year-old Philip Roth, instructor of English and author of unpublished story “The Conversion of the Jews,” which Bellow admires. Fourth and final residency at Yaddo. Autumn semester at Northwestern.
     
    1958 Continues work on novel based on Chapman, now called Henderson the Rain King . In Minneapolis again for autumn term.
     
    1959 “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” in The New York Times Book Review . Henderson the Rain King published in March. (“I was much criticized by reviewers for yielding to anarchic or mad impulses, and abandoning urban settings and Jewish themes. But I continue to insist that my subject ultimately was America.”) “The Swamp of Prosperity” (review of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus ) in Commentary . Comes to know young fiction writer Alice Adams. At work on play variously entitled Bummidge , The Upper Depths , Scenes from Humanitis and, ultimately, The Last Analysis . Separates from Sondra.
     
    1960 Sondra asks for divorce. Bellow does State Department lecture tour of Poland and Yugoslavia; Mary McCarthy also on tour. (“Saul and I parted good friends,” McCarthy afterward writes to Hannah Arendt, “though he is too wary and raw-nerved to be friends, really, even with people he decides to like. He is in better shape than he was in Poland,