By Saul Bellow, from a previously unpublished essay written in 1951 and included in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor and out next month from Viking. Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.

The great issue in fiction is the stature of characters. It starts with something like the psalmist’s question, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” Responses range from “a little lower than the angels” to “a poor, bare, forked animal.” The struggle of the novelist has been to establish a measure, a view of…