I won’t claim it’s a great book, but Saul Bellow’s debut novel, Dangling Man (1944), made quite an impression when I first read it over forty years ago.  Although Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was not the style or quality of his writing that grabbed me.  Instead, it was a vague feeling of contact with the book’s protagonist.  Or more precisely, it was a personal sense of identification with the main character’s plight.  Although Bellow’s protagonist/narrator—a Chicago resident named Joseph—was a product of the depression era, his disconnection from his surroundings was a timeless malady Read more