What is less comprehensible is the lack of fanfare in the same week to mark the centenary of Saul Bellow, a native Quebecer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, the only Canadian-born writer to gain the honour until Alice Munro in 2013.
True, Bellow’s family moved to Chicago when he was nine. His first novelistic triumph, The Adventures of Augie March, opens with the famous declaration: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
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