The Adventures of Augie March
First edition cover
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| Author | Saul Bellow |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Picaresque novel |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
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Publication date
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1953 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
| Pages | 536 pp |
| 813.52 | |
| LC Class | PS3503 .E446 A57 |
The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1953 by Viking Press. It features the eponymous Augie March who grows up during the Great Depression and it is an example of bildungsroman, tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations and relationships from boyhood to manhood.
The Adventures won the 1954 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Both Time magazine and the Modern Library Board named it one of the hundred best novels in the English language.
When the Swedish Academy awarded Bellow the 1976 Nobel Prize in literature, their press release noted that his novels, including Augie March, use a picaresque style that dates back to the earliest origins of the European novel. However, according to the Academy, Bellow uses this episodic traditional form to investigate modern concerns: "the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." With an intricate plot and allusive style, he explores contrasting themes of alienation and belonging, poverty and wealth, love and loss, with often comic undertones.
Its protagonist may be said to represent the modern Everyman—an individual struggling to make sense of, and succeed in, an alienating world. The novel is also specific to the American literary canon in that it celebrates the capacity of the individual to progress in society by virtue of nothing more than his own "luck and pluck." This idea is stated explicitly in the opening and most famous lines of the novel, in which the narrator defines himself as an American. This was an important act of self-definition for the author and narrator, both immigrants to America. It also establishes the dual meaning of "America" in the novel: that is, the physical and political "America," as well as the more figurative "American" as a state-of-mind:
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