This chapter explores the portrayal of Chicago in the fiction of Saul Bellow, examining the conflict between materialism and visionary idealism that lies at the heart of his work. Starting from the stereotypical characterization of Chicago as the home of brute matter, cynical pragmatism, and the mass production of commodities and physical things, the chapter traces Bellow’s autobiographical search for hidden spiritual truths, connecting this to the Jewish notion of being exiled in a foreign land, vestiges of the soul or the spirit disguised among the quotidian ugliness of industrial America. This conflict between things and ideas, matter and spirit, morality and “the hustle” of economic life, draws on both the conflicts of Bellow’s early life and the wider patterns of Jewish immigration and assimilation. Chicago appears in Bellow’s work as both an overwhelming physical presence and a metaphysical absence, linked to the emptiness of the prairies and haunted by the Jewish-Russian past of Bellow’s family. These contradictions and paradoxes are traced through a close reading of Bellow’s short fiction, as well as his major novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift.

This chapter investigates how and why the cultural capital of literary fiction increasingly became aligned with liberalism and the Left in the 1970s and 1980s. It introduces a unique historical perspective that moves away from well-trodden narratives about how modern progressive liberalism, the sixties counterculture, or the New Left altered the landscape of literary fiction, and toward a broader political narrative that interrogates the impact of conservatism as an ideological force on American fiction after the 1960s. This shift in conservative literary taste was a historical contingency, a largely unintended byproduct of arguments between three strains of the post-sixties American Right: the triptych of William F. Buckley’s movement conservatism, Irving Kristol’s neoconservatism, and the reactionary populist New Right. To advance its argument, this chapter concentrates primarily on the writings of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, two major postwar novelists who wrote several of the most critically acclaimed works of the era, but who were eventually seen as occupying very different positions in the political literary fields: Bellow’s literary prestige declining as he was aligned with neoconservativism and the American Right, and Pynchon’s literary prestige increasing as he was aligned with various strands of the New Left and the broader counterculture.