‘I was, in 1937, a very young, married man who had quickly lost his first job and who lived with his in-laws. His affectionate, loyal and pretty wife insisted that he must be given a chance to write something.’

But what?

In ‘Starting Out in Chicago’, originally delivered as a Brandeis commencement address in 1974, Saul Bellow provides a portrait of his beginnings as a writer that, more than anything he ever wrote, captures the early stage of that momentous confrontation in which ‘American society and S. Bellow came face to face.’ If the year is wrong–it was 1938–the details are painfully accurate.