The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow was the youngest of four children born to Lescha and Abraham Bellows. Bellow’s parents emigrated from Russia with their three older children in 1913, and Bellow was born in Canada. Financially prosperous back in St. Petersburg, Bellows’ parents struggled to adjust to a comparatively rough and impoverished life as Eastern European immigrants at a time when these populations faced significant stigma in North America. The family relocated to the United States, settling into the Humbolt Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, when Bellows was nine. An avid reader from childhood, Bellows reportedly decided to become a writer after reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He began college at the University of Chicago, later transferring to nearby Northwestern University. There, he pursued a degree in anthropology and sociology rather than literature because he felt that the English department was unfriendly toward Jewish people like himself. Bellows served in the Merchant Marines during World War II. His long and illustrious literary career began with a book he drafted while in the service, The Dangling Man. It was published in 1944. Bellows divided his long and productive career between writing and teaching. He held appointments or was a guest teacher at the University of Minnesota, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Chicago, New York University, Yale, Princeton, the University of Victoria, Bard College, and Boston University. His literary output includes fourteen novels, four short story collections, one play, and four works of nonfiction, and he won no fewer than fifteen awards and fellowships, including three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Nobel Prize for Fiction. He was married five times and had four children: three sons and a daughter. He died in 2005 at the age of 89. 

The events in The Adventures of Augie March take place against the backdrop of three tumultuous decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Augie finishes high school right around the time that the 1929 stock market crash kicked off the Great Depression. The decade between 1929 and 1939 saw high rates of unemployment and growing poverty in the United States (and around the world). This economic uncertainty contributed to the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who campaigned for president on a program designed to restore economic stability by providing direct relief to the poorest individuals, helping the economy to recover through government investment in public works projects, and reforming the financial system to prevent another economic depression. Augie benefits directly from the so-called “New Deal” when he briefly works as a housing inspector on a Works Progress Administration project. He benefits indirectly from his involvement with the rise of unionization, thanks in part to the 1935 Wagner Act, which protected workers’ rights to form unions and carry out strikes, when he gets a job with the CIO. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, was founded in 1935 as part of the AFL (American Federation of Labor). The two groups diverged in 1938 and merged back together in the 1950s. The lead-up to WWII saw a massive upswing in American union membership, which grew seven-fold, from 2.8 million workers in the early 1930s to 14 million workers in 1945, just as the war was ending. Union membership became a key pathway into middle-class prosperity for millions of American workers around the middle of the 20th century and played an important role in extending the American Dream to millions of people.

Saul Bellow was given the National Book Award in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March. This distinction, as well as the book’s unabashed Americanness, have led some literary critics to proclaim it the Great American Novel. It’s thus worth considering the book alongside other contenders for that title. Works like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) explore themes that Augie March both celebrates and critiques, like American culture, the myth of the American Dream, opportunity, freedom, and self-determination. First and foremost, however, The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque novel. This genre features roguish, lower-class heroes who go from one adventure to another, flirt with criminality, and experience little to no character development throughout their journeys. Although there are important precursors in Greek and Roman literature, the foundational work of the genre is Lazarillo de Tormes, a Spanish novel published anonymously in 1554. The eponymous hero of this book serves a series of brief apprenticeship to men of various classes of society as he learns to become a thief. Notable precursors to Augie March in English include Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, which was published in 1749, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (published serially in 1847–1848). A more recent example is John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces.