Fellow Travelers

In June 1943, 27 year-old Saul Bellow was fired from a film-reviewing job at Time magazine by fellow-traveler Whittaker Chambers. It’s said that Chambers disliked Bellow’s assessment of the poet Wordsworth. Bellow was able to find another job at Encyclopedia Britannica.

Saul Bellow appears six times in A Book of Ages. Whittaker Chambers twice, most famously at age 47 when he gives the House Un-American Activities Committee a tour of the pumpkin patch on his farm in Maryland.