I’m currently reading The Adventures of Augie March. I’m repeatedly struck with how different things were back then. Poverty and family ties before the welfare state. Prohibition. Jewishness before the Holocaust. Sex before wide acceptance of birth control. Communism before Stalin and McCarthyism. Unionism when it was young and growing.
Btw, Bellow is underappreciated. For me, many Nobel Prize authors erudition makes for a hard slog. Bellow’s writing is down to earth and lively. Kinda’ like a baudy, urban equivalent of Steinbeck.
by sandgrubber