This paper is an abbreviated version of one of the three annual Edinburgh University “Town and Gown” lectures. It was given in the City Chambers, Edinburgh, on 3rd March 1964. The deleted material was largely references to Negroes in Scotland. The oratorical overtones, however, have been faithfully preserved. Because of its extensive range, documentation has not been added, but any readers who would like specific references should write to Professor Shepperson at the History Department, Edinburgh University, Scotland.

William Roscoe of Liverpool, banker, historian and man of letters, was George Ticknor and Edward Everett's “first celebrity” in their 1815–1819 European apprenticeship. Roscoe stood for them, as he does in Washington Irving's The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), as “the literary landmark” of Liverpool, and more than that, a gateway to European culture. His house was open to Americans and he introduced them to and sped them on their repossessions of the heritage on which, in the previous years, the young country had turned its back.

Much less noted than the passing of President Kennedy, but also a grievous loss in the United States in 1963, was the death of one of its greatest historians. Although Perry Miller was not technically an historian – he was Professor of American Literature at Harvard – his contribution to our understanding of the American past was as great as that of any man of his generation.

The Adventures of Augie March, although it suffers a complete breakdown in structure and in quality of writing two-thirds of the way through, nevertheless is the most brilliant attempt to write the great American novel. That is, it belongs to a group of novels which either, like dos Passo's U.S.A. try to convey the experience of America, or, like Look Homeward, Angel, the experience of being an American. Augie March, in the Chicago scenes — the first two-thirds of the novel —does both, and this is why it is so richly-textured and inclusive in its sense of life. Bellow's grasp of character, in this context, of being an American, is concentrated in the central figure of Augie March himself, growing from childhood to maturity through a specific historical and social situation. The continuity of natural growth, and Bellow's strong sense of the progression of time — not merely the private chronology of Augie's life, but time as history — give the tale a compulsive drive forward (the impetus of the bildungsroman rather than that of the picaresque novel).