SOURCE: Valiunas, Algis. “Bellow's Progress.” Commentary 116, no. 2 (September 2003): 51-5.

In the following essay, Valiunas traces Bellow's development as an author through his first three novels—Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March—placing Augie March within the context of mid-twentieth-century American culture.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Adventures of Augie March, the Library of America has made Saul Bellow the first living novelist to be admitted to its literary pantheon. The anniversary volume includes not only that breakthrough 1953 work but the two lesser known novels that preceded it, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947). It thus offers a fitting occasion to ask how he got here from there.

Bellow has not exactly disowned his two earliest novels, but he has made it clear that they were apprentice efforts, and that only with Augie March did he begin to command the voice for...