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A richer version of Terkel’s take was described by the journalist Brent Staples in his memoir Parallel Time, which is excerpted as “Mr. Bellow’s Planet” in the outstanding anthology Literary Journalism. Staples–a former Reader contributor and Sun-Times reporter–was, like Bellow, once a young, gifted intellectual at the University of Chicago, but Staples was a black grad student in Hyde Park, a neighborhood with a long and unpleasant history of racial tension.
Staples fell in love with Bellow’s work during his time at the U. of C., in part because of its portrait of the neighborhood. “Dangling Man captured it all. The chrysalis character of graduate school. The idleness and sterility of Hyde Park. The vast emptiness of the wintertime streets. The ice clinging to the gutters into spring, and the desperate longing for warmth. This novel was ground beneath my feet.”
Anyway–“Mr. Bellow’s Planet” is an overlooked masterpiece of Chicago writing; look it up.
