She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into McCory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply, they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and explained the real depth of money. I don't know. But I didn't think myself too good to be wandering in the dime store with her. I went where and as she said and did whatever she wanted because I was threaded to her as if through the skin. So that any trifling object she took pleasure in could become important to me at once; anything at all, a comb or hairpin or piece of line, a compass inside a tin ring that she bought with great satisfaction, or a green billed baseball cap for the road, or the kitten she kept in the apartment - she would never be anywhere without an animal.

When Bellow was nine his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago the city that was to form the backdrop of many of his novels. " Bellow's protagonists in one shape or another all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde the dean in "The Dean's December") called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century. ) Bellow celebrated his birthday in June although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar).

Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid a "thick-necked" rowdy and an immigrant from Quebec. " This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved if it can be achieved at all through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture of entertaining adventure drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act or prevent us from acting and that can be called the dilemma of our age.