Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953) follows the hero's coming of age as he tries to make sense of his life in the middle part of the twentieth century in America.

Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), which won the National Book Award for fiction, tells the life story of Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor living in New York, and his penetrating observations on the human condition and contemporary American culture.

Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (1984) anthologizes existentialist thinkers, and includes the arguments between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the subject of Christianity, a topic Herzog writes about in his letters.

Stuart A. Kallen's Life in America During the 1960s (The Way People Live) (2001) presents a comprehensive overview of the history and culture of the period in which Bellow's novel takes place.

Albert Camus's The Stranger, published in 1942, is a widely...