Saul Bellow's second novel. Critics called it "the best English-language work of the 1940s" and compared it with Dostoevsky's early works. At first, a simple story about the editor of a small New York magazine, joyfully plunging into bachelor freedom during the departure of his wife, soon turns into a parable of astonishing power. A parable about personal self-expression and the complexity of the human soul, always torn apart by high impulses and base passions...