Dangling Man (1944), the first novel, reflects much of Bellow's early life as a young intellectual, immersed in literature of all kinds, isolated in a cheap, rented apartment, poor, impractical, waiting to be drafted. It is also the lament of a young artist who does not know how to join the mainstream of Chicago or American life without losing the spiritual value of his isolation. It is also greatly influenced by the 1940s preoccupation of American intellectuals with French existentialism. Bellow began his literary career when such modern writers as Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot were past their creative peaks and already a fixed orthodoxy in the universities. Thus, it was these modern writers who shaped his consciousness as a young man and directly influenced the form, content, and style of his first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim. Both of these early novels reflect existentialist premises and modernist literary techniques in their representations of alienated heroes hostile environments, and apparently absurd worlds. Likewise, their tight, organic forms and highly aesthetic polish also help establish them as modernist novels. However, the more immediate backdrop for both was the Nuremburg tribunals and the emotional impact of the Holocaust on the American Jewish community. What of anti-Semitism in America, Bellow seems to be asking. 

It drew an amazing critical response for a first novel. It was reviewed by nearly every major journal and newspaper in the country. Furthermore, there seemed to be a general agreement that Bellow had written an important novel with style, mastery, brilliance of thought, and sharp, cutting language. Reviewers predicted an auspicious literary career for the young writer. Central to the novel was the theme of search for the value of individual freedom, the meaning of moral responsibility, and the demands of social contract, themes Bellow and other American writers would continue to explore in the decades up to the present. Also of significance is Bellow's development of a narrative pattern that will govern nearly all of his work for the next forty years. Dangling Man is written in the personal voice of a protagonist whose principal domain is his own sensibility, and whose principal audience is himself. The text is striking in its exclusion of the female voice, its enactment of a homosocial male world, and the overt narcissism and misogyny of its protagonist, Joseph. It is the story of a young man caught waiting for the draft, who believes that intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, that state so sought after by the nineteenth century romantics, is to be attained by isolating himself within the confines of a cheap New York boarding house room while he studies the writers of the Enlightenment. As the months go by Joseph quarrels with nearly all his friends and relatives, lives off the earnings of his faithful wife, succumbs to fits of paranoia and anger, engages in a desultory affair, learns to hate the physical decay of his elderly neighbors, is haunted by death anxieties, and in danger of estranging his wife, Eva. Finally he admits his experiment has been a failure, that his perspectives have all ended in four walls, and his search for enhanced being cannot be conducted in this manner. Reduced to the same common physical, social and historical denominator as everyone else, he is last seen standing in a line of naked military recruits being prodded and poked by an elderly military physician, prior to entering the Navy. His search for a special fate will have to be conducted through social and historical complicity and not apart from it, Bellow seems to be implying. 

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