Go to Paris, Follow the Sparkling Stream

Saul Bellow may have published his first novel by 30, but he wasn't exactly setting the literary world on fire. When his second novel didn't catch either, the dispirited 33-year-old Bellow went to Paris to try again. "Then," explains the New Yorker's Joan Acocella, "he experienced an epiphany: 'I had a room in Paris where I was working, and one day as I was going there after breakfast, a bright spring morning, I saw water trickling down the street and sparkling.' The shining stream, he said, suggested to him the form of a new novel." Bellow loosened up, wrote The Adventures of Augie March, and became a big star. "For years, Bellow had been old; now, in his thirties, he could be young."

Finding Augie March [The New Yorker]
Bellow Bio [The Nobel Foundation]