Dangling Man

By Saul Bellow

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Saul Bellow's first novel, published in 1944, is the journal of Joseph, a young man in Chicago who has quit his job to wait for his draft call during the Second World War. As the wait stretches into months, he drifts away from his wife, friends and family, and quarrels with almost everyone, while he questions what freedom means and how to live.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”