Novel
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow · 1953
Synopsis
Augie March, son of Jewish immigrants, tells of his youth in the poor neighbourhoods of Chicago, where he grows up fatherless, between a simple-minded mother who is losing her sight, an elder brother, Simon, who wants a fortune, a younger brother, Georgie, who is feeble-minded and will be put in care, and Grandma Lausch, a lodger with no blood tie who rules the household. He hands out leaflets, serves the businessman William Einhorn, sells shoes, steals books, recruits for a union, helps a woman in Mexico who trains an eagle, and joins the merchant marine. Each time someone tries to fix him somewhere, he moves on.
Context
Begun in Paris in 1948 thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship, the book was also written in Rome, Minneapolis, New York and Princeton; its author said he had not written a word of it in Chicago, which he nevertheless made its setting. In it he broke with the restraint of his first two novels, well received but poorly selling, a restraint which, he said, had driven him mad. Published by Viking in September 1953, it opens with a sentence in which the narrator declares himself an American, born in Chicago, one of the most famous openings in the American novel.
Who it is for
A long picaresque novel made up of episodes that follow one another. Translated by Jean Rosenthal in 1959, then by Michel Lederer in 2014.
Prizes and reception
National Book Award 1954; the book of his breakthrough, eighty-first on the Modern Library's list of the hundred best novels.
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