Although Bellow's work places him squarely in the tradition of American Realism which goes back to William Dean Howells and Henry James, the satiric slant and the weighted naming of the characters in this novel suggest such eighteenth-century iconoclastic writers as Fielding and Voltaire. The breadth of his social portraiture brings to mind Dickens and Balzac. Finally, Bellow, at least in More Die of Heartbreak, which tells a terrible story but is nevertheless full of laughs, is also in the camp of contemporary black humorists.