The Adventures of Augie March

About Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is the novel that broke Saul Bellow into his mature voice — a sprawling, exuberant Bildungsroman that opens with one of the most famous first sentences in American fiction ('I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style') and follows the young Augie March from Depression-era Chicago through bootlegging, eagle training in Mexico, and the merchant marine. The novel won the National Book Award and established Bellow as the dominant voice of his literary generation, a conscious break from Hemingway's minimalism toward the amplitude of nineteenth-century social fiction. It is the foundational text of the post-Shoah American Jewish novel and the model for Philip Roth's later exuberance, and it stands as one of the great American picaresques alongside Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and On the Road.