Young Saul

Louis Menand examines Saul Bellow's fiction, at The New Yorker, and in doing so also examines his life, such as this from his post-college period.

"He also worked for a time at the Encyclopædia Britannica, on the fifty-two-volume “Great Books of the Western World,” under the editorship of Mortimer J. Adler. Bellow was in charge of editing part of the 'Syntopicon,' a two-volume digest of the Great Ideas composed by Adler. He had taken one of Adler’s courses at the University of Chicago and had concluded that it was 'tomfoolery,' but he seems to have liked the job."