Seize the Day, Saul Bellow, 1956

Bellow’s fourth novel is the story of Tommy Wilhelm’s needs, despair, failure, and breakdown in post WWII New York.  Dismissed by his physician father as a failure, fired from his job as a salesman, nearing divorce from his wife, Wilhelm struggles with feelings of unimportance and alienation.  The world doesn’t even notice him, and he is incapable of coming to terms with his own limitations.  Biblical sense of despair portrayed by Bellow with infinite precision in his Flaubertian use of language and metaphor.