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city life, suffused with eagerness and delight. Bellow’s pulsing use of words is controlled by the simplicity Augie constantly insists upon, and so this novel avoids the Jewish sentimentality and convoluted clamour which become tiresome in Bellow’s later works. This is a Great Expectations or David Copperfield set in Chicago, full of a sense of longing – a longing for family, for love: the greatest and most universal of all themes in fiction.
    Saul Bellow was born in Canada and lived in Boston. Among his famous novels are Seize the Day (1947), Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Both The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog won National Book Awards. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
    Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
     
     

(2) Saul Bellow 1915–2005
     
1964 Herzog
     
    Herzog is Bellow’s most accomplished novel in which ideas are presented fluently without damaging the characters or the sense of life in the narrative. It has a marvellous first sentence: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’
    He is indeed out of his mind, and he has many good reasons to be so. One, his mind is too well stocked, he knows too much, he has read too much Western philosophy and it weighs him down. Two, his wife has behaved appallingly, has run off with his friend; ‘run off’ may not, however, be the appropriate term since his friend has only one leg. Three, he is oversexed for a man of his age. Four, his whole family history and the emotion surrounding it exasperate him and make him sad. And these are only four examples.
    Moses Herzog will not lie down; his despair is made all the worse by the fact that it is rich in comedy. He writes letters to elderly relatives, to the President, to the New York Times , to many dead philosophers. He is deeply worried about the future of civilization, but he is easily distracted by jealousy, further bouts of madness, lust and memories of childhood, not to speak of guilt and hatred, and by his new girlfriend, the wonderful Ramona. The novel possesses an extraordinary narrative energy. Herzog and those close to him take on a life of their own in the book, and the ideas about the future of civilization which obsess him are woven carefully and skilfully into the story of his disintegration.
    Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
     
     

Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973
     
1963 The Little Girls
     
    The title of this novel is ironic. Whatever their age, the three girls in question are in spirit anything but little. Diana-Dinah (Dicey), Clare (Mumbo) and Sheila (Sheikie) emit that fiery power certain women have, which they get from smelting whatever gifts circumstances have given them, however shoddy, into monumental wills of iron. In 1914 the girls are at school together at St Agatha’s in Kent. Fifty years later, Dinah begins to fret for her old friends and she advertises for them; Mumbo and Sheikie surface. These bare bones convey nothing of the rich flesh of this novel, splendidly droll both in its dialogue and in the testy, ironic tone of Bowen’s writing. She is given to short, devastating sentences and she applies them to places and persons: her account of the streets and ‘flaccid gates’ and crumbling dogs of the houses of southern England is incomparable. But the real treasure of this novel is its excavation of the meaning of memory, the meaning of time passing, Bowen’s attempt to catch the very moment when it does. That she succeeds turns this brisk comedy into an extraordinary piece of work: clever, beautifully written, a novel which grasps in words and images and laughter that comic despair which comes from the acceptance of life as something which can be only half seen, half known, half understood.
    Elizabeth Bowen was born in Ireland and lived both there and in England. The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949) are two of her most praised