Bellow: Looking for Mr. Green

Saul Bellow's short story from 1951 - one of his first publications I would guess - Looking for Mr. Green (collected in Mosby's Memoirs) is justifiably famous, a terrific and subtle look at racism and class in America but without overstatement or acrimony. The story in follows a 30something man in Chicago in the 1930s who has just begun a new much-coveted job (this is in the midst of the Depression) w the city - delivering welfare check to those too ill or disabled to come to collect the check themselves. He's workin in the "Negro" district, and his job - all takes place one one day and setting, classic example of unified action - takes him into scenes of unimaginable squalor. He is confident that he is doing benevolent work - though there's the sense that the whole welfare industry just maintains the social inequities. What gives the story its poignancy and irony is that we learn a bit about the protagonist's back story - his working class background, his study in college of languages and classics, his brief stint at teaching - all for naught. As he reflects, he's had a lot of bad luck- in life, love, and profession, so we feel great sorrow for him as he pursues his dismal quest to fine one elusive welfare recipient - a Sisyphean task it would seem. I'm not sure whether the ending effectively closes this story but everything else in this piece is like a rich mine of sociology and a portrait of a man in his quiet and persistent way trying to do some good in this world - and not for his own advancement.

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