New York: The Vanguard Press,, 1944. Sociology and poetry in Chicago First edition, first printing, of the author's first book, inscribed by him on the front free endpaper, "To Kurt & Carla Wolff, affectionately, Saul Bellow". One of the Wolffs has added "[Chicago Ap 15, 44]" beneath Bellow's inscription and "Kurt & Karla Wolff, Chicago, Mr. 27, 1944 (H. Bookstore)" above. This is an excellent association, from Bellow to his friend and fellow writer, the influential sociologist Kurt Wolff (1912-2003). They met in Chicago: Bellow was raised there, and Wolff "had fallen in love with the region, with the people and with the situation" (quoted in Stehr) while a research fellow at the Social Science Research Council in the early 1940s. Bellow wrote this book, about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted, during his service with the merchant marine during the Second World War. Both Bellow and Wolff were significantly engaged in one another's disciplines: Bellow was a writer educated in sociology, and Wolff a sociologist whose literary experiments Bellow encouraged. Bellow was a Canadian-born Lithuanian-Jew who had graduated from Northwestern University with an honours in anthropology and sociology, the study of which had a marked influence on his literary style. Wolff was a Jewish German-born sociologist forced out of Germany by rising Naziism, who recounted that "after a relatively short time in America I began to write literature, in which the most important help I received was from Saul Bellow, whom I got to know in Chicago in 1943". Wolff co-founded a short-lived poetic journal titled Experiment around this time, and it was then that his central sociological ideas of surrender and catch "gave rise to a synthesis between sociology and poetry". He stated that "my method of imagination is neither sociological nor poetic, but rather spontaneously phenomenological, if I may call it that. That means, the attempt to capture something as exactly as possible, which is thus, as you see, connected to the art of poetry as much as to the appearance of nature, but isn't one of the other: it's a third method". Both Wolff and Bellow shared this dedication to a "third method": in 1962 Bellow returned to Chicago as a professor on the Committee on Social Thought, the goal of which was to develop multidisciplinary approaches to learning. He taught on the committee for more than 30 years. This is a significant association from the beginning of an intellectually fertile relationship. Octavo. Original light green cloth, spine lettered in brown, small design of man with arm outstretched on front cover in brown, top edge brown. With dust jacket. Spine a touch sunned and cocked, spine ends just bumped, cloth and edges lightly soiled, edges of endpapers lightly toned. A very good copy indeed, internally clean, in like jacket, edges toned, shallow chips to head of spine and corners, a little rubbing to front panel, a few short closed tears to folds and one across spine, head of front panel and flaps a touch creased, edges nicked, unclipped, a clean example. Nico Stehr, "A Conversation with Kurt H. Wolff", Gary Backhaus & George Psathas (eds.), The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff's Existential Turn, 2007.
