Saul Bellow Journal
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The Adventures of Augie March

Criticism | Reviews

Criticism

  • Acocella, Joan. “Finding Augie March / Saul Bellow.” Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. 381–92. Print. Rpt. of “Finding Augie March: Saul Bellow’s First Novels.” New Yorker 6 Oct. 2003: 112–17.


    Celebrates the addition to the Library of America’s series of DM, TV, and AAM on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of AAM. Reviews the plots and settings of all three novels. Considers AAM embedded in historical circumstance as it responds to European modernists—the Wastelanders—as well as to the Jewish literary crowd and to the American intellectuals of the fifties disengaging from the Soviet Union and busy re-embracing their own country. Claims that nowadays the book enchants because of its comedy, generosity, density, and linguistic miracles. Concludes that as Augie drives across Normandy, the war dead beneath his wheels, he knows and can’t stop hoping that there really is an America and hope in the future. 

  • Aithal, S. Krishnamoorthy. "American Ethnic Fiction in the Universal Human Context." American Studies International 21.5 (1983): 61–66.
    Discusses the desire of ethnic groups to move beyond ethnic boundaries and seek an identity in basic human terms. Such concerns about identiy find vivid and powerful expression in the lives and fortunes of the protagonist of AAM. Augie's identity as a Jew is the point of this novel. Though Augie comes under the spell of many destiny-molders, he eventually spurns them all. Eventually, he defines his identity not in terms of religion, race, or nationality, but in terms of human essence. Augie is a man who transcends the accidents of birth, his ethnic and national boundaries, and who impresses us primarily as a human being.
  • Alam, Fakrul. "A Possible Source of Augie's Axial Lines." Notes on Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1980): 6–7.


  • Traces the concept of the "axial lines" reference to Karl Jaspers' essay "The Axial Age of Human History," published in 1948 in Commentary, a journal to which Bellow occasionally contributed.
  • Aldridge, John W. "The Society of Three Novels." In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity. John W. Aldridge. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956. 126–48. Rpt. as "The Society of Augie March" in The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture, 1951–1971. John W. Aldridge. New York: Harper Magazine Press, 1972. 224–30.
    Sees AAM as a spiritual picaresque—a later form of the bildungsroman. Here the hero is consciousness rather than swashbuckling rogue, and as such is required to develop, deepen, strike through its first illusion to the truth, which, at the end of the road, it discovers to be its fate. But this novel begins with the aphorism that "Man's character is his fate" and ends with the aphorism transposed "man's fate is his character." The learning is in the transposition.
  • Alter, Robert. "Heirs of the Tradition." Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel. Robert Alter. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964. 106–32.
    Bellow adapts the picaresque form into the novelistic idiom of the mid-twentieth-century. Augie is a typical picaroon in his insatiable quest for experience and limitless curiosity. Alter calls the Whitmanesque catalogue sentences crammed with vitality and his vision of the world "multiverse." By refusing to fall prey to the systematizers, Augie has appeal for the modern audience. Like the typical picaroon he is appealing to both men and women. Ultimately he is an atypical picaroon because Bellow is using also the bildungs-roman model of search for self-identity. Unlike the picaroon, Augie never seeks experience for its own sake.
  • Amis, Martin. "A Chicago of a Novel." Atlantic Oct. 1995: 114–20, 122–27. Rpt. as "Why Augie Has It All."Gaurdian Supplement 4 Aug. 1995: 2–5.
    Declares that AAM is the great American novel. Suggests that the quest ended there and that it entailed a chimera, or a pig with wings. It involved an answer to the question of whether Americans had an American identity or whether America was a continental holding-camp of Greeks, Jews, Brits, Italians, Scandinavians, and Lithuanians, together with the remaining Amerindians from ice-age Mongolia. Concludes that miraculously and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home, dedicated it to his father, and published it in 1953. Its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its calmness, and its promiscuity demonstrate its quintessential Americanness. A major critical treatment of AAM.
  • Anderson, David D. "Saul Bellow's Mexican Fiesta: The Adventures of Augie March as Expatriate Spectacle." Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter. 22.3 (1992): 21–31.
    Notes the affinity Americans and American writers have always had for Mexico. Aruges that this fondness of Mexico is fully explored in AAM. Unlike his literary forebearers such as Huckleberry Finn or George Willard, Augie remains a passive hero. There is an absence of purpose, direction, faith, or even determination to escape. He dangles. Mexico is the illusion of sanctuary from a world of violence, an idea occupying twenty-six chapters of AAM. Details the events of these chapters and suggests that they compare with Huck's adventures along the river, deeper and deeper into slave territory. Sees the Leon Trotsky episode as Bellow's confession of romantic gullibility over a celebrity. Augie is Huck Finn carried forward in time.
  • Beebe, H. Keith. "Biblical Adventures in an American Novel." Journal of Bible and Religion Apr. 1959: 133–38.
    In the context of examining biblical adventures in American fiction, discusses AAM for its myriad biblical allusions. Concludes that Bellow's mind is steeped in Old and New Testament biblical stories.
  • Bergler, Edmund. "Writers of Half-Talent." American Imago 14.2 (1957): 155–64.
    Claims that Bellow is a writer of half talent, neither truly creative nor a hack. Writers in this sub-group describe persons and situations vividly. Because the characters they depict are seemingly alive, they hold the reader's interest, but something is still missing. The missing link consists of frantic avoidance of the most decisive human motivation: unconscious psychic masochism. As a result the writer piles up a plethora of "interesting" situations; he overstresses sex; he substitutes external events for internal vicissitudes. In short, his characters are static rather than dynamic.
  • Berryman, John. "A Note on Augie." The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, 1940. 222–24.
    Places AAM in the Dreiserian naturalistic tradition.
  • Bromwich, David. "Some American Masks." Dissent 20 (Winter 1973): 35–45.
    Bromwich claims that AAM comes close to being a great novel, a rallying cry and a great portent. Augie as a drifter becomes dark angel of our representative mass fictions, and yet. Concludes that Bellow relies too heavily on the reader to infer his qualities. Adds strength to the traditions of the realistic novel.
  • Buddy, Kasia. The White Boy Looks at the Black Boy.
    Discusses Bellow's friendship with Ralph Ellison and notes the proximity in publication of Bellow's review of Invisible Man, and the publication of AAM. Both won a National Book Award, and both share many formal and thematic concerns—a picaresque structure, first-person narrator, a rejection of ideological absolutism in faces of individual morality. Treats the different ways the two novels negotiate between a desire for ethnic and racial self-expression, and a liberal universalist (and individualist) agenda. Shows how both authors strive towards that great mythic hold-all, the Great American Novel, or to adapt the Great Omni-American novel. Both are bildungsroman concerned with self-fashioning protest fiction as much as they are anti-Horatio Alger novels, since niether protagonist rises. Education and assimilation are treated with great irony by both writers; both turn back to writers of the American Renaissance, and the nineteenth century European novel; both adopted a classic liberal universalist tone rejecting assessments of themselves as ethnic writers. Also, both wrote in a symbolic vernacular, in a language of true middle-of-consciousness forged from double consciousness in order to evoke ethnic stereotypes of blackness and whiteness. Both simply wanted not to be cast into ethnic designations, yet it has happened to both of them. Concludes that neither author has been viewed as omni-American, but rather as of omni-world literature.
  • Cavalcanti, Leticia N. Tavares. "'Chicago born, free style': The Picaresque in The Adventures of Augie March." Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of Language and Literature [Brazil] 15–16.1–2 (1986): 183–93.
    AAM belongs to the universal genre of the literature of the road, the moving American frontier. Sees AAM as Whitmanesque and picaresque. As pilgrim, traveler, Colombus in chains, Augie rediscovers America. Bellow's "axial lines" are the mood, matter, and mind of the pica resque in America, the point of return to the spirit of the country once conceived in liberty in 1776, matured through experience in 1865 and thoroughly revived in more recent years.
  • Chapman, Sara S. "Melville and Bellow in the Real World: Pierre and Augie March." West Virginia University Bulletin. Philological Papers 18 (1971): 51–57.
    AAM is a modern romantic novel about a typically nineteenth-century explorer-discoverer somewhat removed from the civil state, who bears many resemblances to Melville's Pierre. Pierre may be seen as a tragic prototype for the less unfortunate Augie. Both are sensitive young men through whom the respective authors attempt to reveal "what is."Both have a vision of heroism and participate in youthful tragedy. Chapman details a convincing number of parallels in the two heroes, the philosophical issues discussed and in the major themes.
  • Crozier, Robert D. "Theme in Augie March." Critique 7.3 (1965): 18–32.
    With Salinger, Bellow is the forerunner of a more maturely intellectual and spiritual America. The theme complex in AAM is a pentagonal pattern concentrating on character—fate, power, money, love, and urbanization. Underlying these are thoughts about masculine and feminine personality, history, nature, society, and civilization. All of these are dealt with in a complex relation to the action of the novel and produce splendid unity.
  • Decap, Roger. "Picaresque et Nouveau Roman: The Adventures of Augie March." Caliban 22 (1983): 69–81.
    Provides a generalized discussion of previous critical opinions on Bellow and an equally generalized series of speculative comments on distinctive features of AAM, including the element of the picaresque.
  • De Logu, Pietro. "The European Roots of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945–1985. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: English Dept., Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988. 445–50.
    Discusses first the Americanist tradition of AAM and then the great tradition of the European novel, which nourishes the language, the technique, the form, and the moral and spiritual bent of the book. Begins with the picaresque traditions and moves forward historically through the sentimental novel, bildungsroman, Goethe, and the modern tradition of the poetic novel.
  • Frohock, W. M. "Saul Bellow and his Penitent Picaro." Southwest Review 53 (Winter 1968): 36–44.
    What distinguishes this book from the older picaresque novels is its moral awareness. This is the source of its human richness. In contrast with the older picaros, Augie has interest in and affection for those around him. The fundamental tone of the novel is "matter of factness" rather than joviality. Unlike the conventional picaro, Augie lacks humor and does not live peacefully within his own skin. AAM is really a confessional novel that uses the picaresque form. Augie, unlike Holden Caulfield and the Invisible Man, is the prisoner, not of innocence, but of "un-innocence."
  • Fuchs, Daniel. "The Adventures of Augie March: The Making of a Novel." Americana-Austriaca: Beitrage zur Amerikakunde. Ed. Klaus Lanzinger. Vol. 5. Vienna: Universitats-Verlags-buchandlung, 1980. 27–50.
    Discusses what has been enlarged upon in the notebooks or discarded for a clear perception of Bellow's intention in the actual novel. A fine comparison by one of the few critics to deal with Bellow's original manuscripts. Likens Augie to Whitman in his evasion of self-definitions. Points out that Augie, while possessing the will to moral certitude, more often embraces love as his chief function. Both in its inception and in its final form the novel manifests an unresolved tension between love and use. Linguistically AAM points to activity, event, and history. The novel is best understood as a writer's expression of a particular historical moment, the revisionist liberal early 1950's. As ingenue Augie's expectations exceed his consumations. Critics have exaggerated the optimism of the book. Bellow was one of the first to register the loss of the power of positive thinking.
  • Gerbaud, Colette. "Aventure(s) et Sacre dans Les Aventures d'Augie March." Aspects du Sacre dans la Litterature Anglo-Americaine. Reims: Publications du Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire dans !es Litteratures de Langue Anglaise, 1979. 107–29.

  • Gerson, Steven M. "The New American Adam in The Adventures of Augie March." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 117–28.
    Augie is similar to the nineteenth-century Adams evident in Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. However, events in the last half of the novel leave him pessimistic, defeated, and broken—traits that are anathema to early American Adamism. Yet he does envision paradise as the fulfillment of the American dream and paradise as escape from modern dilemmas. This Adam differs from R. W. B. Lewis's model because his consciousness has been shaped by twentieth century horrors. Augie is actually Bellow's deliberate transformation of an early American Adam into a modern one.
  • Goldberg, Gerald Jay. "Life's Customer, Augie March." Critique 3.3 (1960): 15–27.
    Bellow's form is right for his content, but his content is not always right for his form. Augie is not a substantial fictional creation. There is too much emphasis on milieu and no dynamic focal point. Bellow's dual purposes create confusion. He is torn between nostalgic re-creation of an old world he has known and writing a cohesive novel. Details the points of similarity between Tom Jones and AAM. Finally points up the differences between Fielding's comic epic and Bellow's comic romance.
  • Guerard, Albert J. "Saul Bellow and the Activists: On The Adventures of Augie March." Southern Review 3 (1967): 582–96. German translation ["Saul Bellow und die Aktivisten: Uber The Adventures of Augie March") appeared in Der Amerikanische Roman im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Trans. Anton Kaes. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Berlin: Schmidt, 1974. 353–65.
    Locates Bellow among activist writers (belief in energy and vitality) such as Roth, Gold, Percy, Engel, Baldwin, Algren, Donleavy, Kerouac, Kesey, Pynchon and Wright Morris. AAM is the seminal work behind these more recent contributions. Attributes much of the activist energy in AAM to its rhetorical novelty. Relates this to technical issues arising from the use of the picaresque form and point of view problems. Accuses Bellow of lacking an accurate ear and of periodic rhetorical self-indulgence.
  • Gunn, Drewey Wayne. "The Followers of Humboldt." American and British Writers in Mexico 1556–1973. Drewey Wayne Gunn. Austin: U of Texas P, 14–36.
    A crucial chapter for background material on Alexander Von Humboldt. Has relevance for source studies in both HG and AAM.
  • Hitchens, Christopher. "The Great American Augie." Wilson Quarterly 25.1 (2001): 22–29.
    Compares The Great Gatsby and AAM in terms on how they draw strength from America, their optimism, and principles. Argues that in this novel for the first time, an immigrant is acting like a pioneer, a rightful discoverer. Discusses at length Augie's sense of his own American identity, his patriotism, and awareness of his own eligibility. Wanderlust, Augie's fundamental theme, appears in the earlier novels, while all the novels that came after it drew their confidence, lift, and breath from it.
  • Jones, David R. "The Disappointments of Maturity: Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." The Fifties.' Fiction, Poetry and Drama. Ed. Warren French. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970. 83–92.
    Discusses the conditions in Paris under which the novel was written and its relationship to the early unpublished manuscript entitled "The Crab and the Butterfly." Jones goes on to criticize the novel for its reckless strategy of flinging a hero out across the surface of a very large work, at which point he tends to lose the focus of his material. Questions also the nature of the hero with his circular motions and demented jabbering in the face of alternating demands. Comments also on the pitch of the prose. Finally, man and his city have become superficies to the novel's many successes and to its potential.
  • Levine, Paul. "Saul Bellow: The Affirmation of the Philosophical Fool." Perspective 10.4 (1959): 163–76.

  • Lewis, R. W. B. "Recent Fiction: Picaro and Pilgrim." A Time of Harvest: American Literature 1910–1960. Ed. Robert E. Spiller. American Century Series 50. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. 144–53.
    Sees Bellow as typical of post-war novelists in the sprawling picaresque nature of his fiction. Argues that he represents a cunning fusion of Anglo-American literary traditions with Yiddish tradition. Augie retains pride and isolation in his refusal to be recruited by a world not worthy of him. He is willing to take on with marvelously inadequate equipment as much of the world as is available to him without fully submitting to its determinism. He struggles tirelessly and at times absurdly to realize the full potential of his Adamic predecessor. Bellow engenders a hopeful and vulnerable sense of life in this novel.
  • Lindberg, Gary. "Playing for Real." The Confidence Man in American Literature. Gary Lindberg. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. 231–58.
    Discusses how in contemporary literature the confidence man is treated increasingly straightforwardly. Conning becomes admirable. Discusses AAM in this context. Augie comprises two traditions of American con men—'the omnivorous jack-of-all-trades and the rogue-survivor. Augie's shapeshifting becomes a mode of being as well as a means of survival.
  • Meyers, Jeffrey. "Brueghel and Augie March." American Literature 49.1 (1977): 113–19. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 83–88.
    Breughel's painting "The Misanthrope" (1568) forms a symbolic center of meaning in the complex and variegated book and expresses some of its dominant themes: the earthy pilgrimage, the relation of character and fate, pessimism about human misery, the conflict between acceptance and rejection of the world, and idealistic longing for rustic simplicity. Finally, Breughel's painting portrays three distinct ways of dealing with the hostile world: joining its corruption, making a partial renunciation, and retreating to the bucolic ideal. Augie ponders all three. However, he resists the pessimism of Breughel's "Misanthrope."
  • Nakajima, Kenji. "Freedom in The Adventures of Augie March." Kyushu American Literature 23 (May 1982): 11–24.
    Argues that as the book opens, Augie is an open personality subject to change. As he changes, he finally seeks freedom from people and from love. He ends as a solipsistic egoist.
  • Newman, Judie. "Saul Bellow and Ortega y Gasset: Fictions of Nature, History and Art in The Adventures of Augie March." Durham University Journal 77.1 (1984): 61–70. (ns 46.1).
    Contends that AAM reveals a close familiarity with Ortega's philosophy that dictates both the intellectual argument of the book and the major incidents in its plot. Newman argues that indeed the novel advances a literary manifesto that relies to a large extent on a systematic rejection of Ortega's ideas centering on an examination of the dictum that "Man has no nature, what he has is history."
  • Overbeck, Pat Trefzger. "The Women in Augie March." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10.4 (1968): 471–84.
    Overbeck contends that it is the unlettered Rebecca and the women who supplant her in Augie's life who ground him emotionally and objectify his apocalpytic vision of his independent fate. This configuration of women gives the novel its fulcrum and structural support. Traces the successive encounters with these women and shows how Augie as narrator distorts and stereotypes them into either virago or victim. Concludes that in Stella March Augie has finally acquired an understanding of women that is atypical of the contemporary male as he observes how similar to him she really is.
  • Parkinson de Saz, Sara M. "The Adventures of Augie March, de Saul Bellow: Norteamerica: Fermento de Picaros?" La picaresca.' Origenes, textos y estructuras. Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre la Picaresca organizado por el Patronato "Arcipreste de Hita." Madrid: Fundacion Universi-taria Espanola, 1979. 1177–83.
    Provides a detailed review of AAM. Relates the novel to the old Spanish picaresque tradition as well as to the contemporary North American novelistic tradition.
  • Pearce, Richard. "Looking Back at Augie March." Yiddish 6.4 (1987): 3540.
    Discusses AAM in its historical context and argues that this "fantasy holiday," as Bellow called it, is an American version of what Mikhail Bahktin calls "carnival—a crude, sometimes farcical, open, heterogeneous mode of expression, as opposed to the homogeneous, closed, serious, 'official' form. The American version is usually restrained by vestiges of Puritanism on the one hand and facile optimism on the other. Neither Walt Whitman nor Huck Finn—with whom Augie is frequently compared—could revel in the subversive, indeed destructive impulses loosened by the carnival spirit." While many Americans were shocked by its crude humor and sexuality, the figure who really approaches the carnival is not Augie but Grandma Lausch.
  • Petillon, Pierre-Yves. "Picaro en democratie [Picaro in Democracy].'' Caliban 20 (1983): 61–67.

  • Pizer, Donald. "Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March." Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Donald Pizer. Crosscurrents/Modern Critique/ New Series. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1982. 133–149.
    Discusses AAM as a novel about all the forces that compel, condition, and shape mankind, including such things as decay, death, and the shaping power of other human wills. Calls the book a naturalistic novel of ideas.
  • Popkin, Henry. "American Comedy." Kenyon Review 16 (1954): 329–34.
    AAM presents a richly comic pattern of aspiration and disaster all cast in unmistakable tones of hyperbole. Augie is constantly reminding the reader that he is not Timur, Tallyrand, Christ, Cecil Rhodes, or any other hero. Yet he dreams of greatness, commanding personalities, secret sources of power, and women with style. His adventures are faltering steps toward these ideals. Augie finally discovers that his dreams of glory have outrun his achievements. This novel is at its strongest when it is representing Augie's distinctive amalgam of aspiration, disaster, and optimism.
  • Pughe,Thomas. "Reading the Picaresque: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and More Recent Adventures." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 77:1 (1996): 59–70.
    Argues that while both novels share genetic heritage in the evolution of the picaresque novel, it seems evident that Bellow sought to develop his own distinctly modernist voice in contradistinction to the nineteenth century heritage that his text invokes. Traces the influence of Twain on AAM. Mentions specifically voice, story, modifications, and uses of satire. Argues that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and AAM are not pure picaresque novels, but hybrids: picaresque novels of formation or anti-formation in which both writers address the question what it means to be an American. Seventy years after Twain's response to the question Bellow's AAM deals with the cultural context of Chicago between the wars. However, AAM is ultimately closer to the modernists of his own time because he and Twain convey a set of common values that, generally speaking, have romantic or realistic roots. Concludes that Augie March, Holden Caulfield, and Jack Kerouac are the last true heirs of Huck Finn.
  • Riggan, William. "The Picaro." Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns.' The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1981. 38–78.
    Sees AAM directly in the picaresque tradition, unlike most modern works with their "consciously reflective and existential" concerns.
  • 586. Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Augie March's Mexican Adventures." Indian Journal of American Studies 8.2 (1978): 39–43.
    Rodrigues claims that the strange world of Thea and Mexico owes its existence to the real-life adventures of Daniel and Jule Mannix, two famous hunters in Taxco, Mexico. Bellow visited this couple in Mexico in 1940 while they were on their honeymoon. They had trained a bald eagle called Aguila which they used to capture dragon iguanas. When this episode was published by Harper's Bazaar, Mannix wanted to sue Bellow and was persuaded not to. Rodrigues goes on to detail Bellow's debt for landscape and other detail to this trip and this geographic area. He also details what Bellow borrowed from the Mannix's articles on training the eagle and concludes that Bellow's imaginative use of the material more than adequately transforms it for the purposes of fiction.
  • Rosu, Anca. "The Picaresque Technique in Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March." Analele Universitatii Bucuresti 22 (1973): 191–97.
    Describes how Bellow has adapted the method of the picaresque novel of previous centuries because it provides him with the autobiographical mode he wants, along with the appearance of simplicity, candor and ingenuousness necessary for depicting an alternate kind of hero from the typically distorted intellectual characteristic of the twentieth-century novel.
  • Sherman, Bernard. "The Adventures of Augie March." The Invention of the Jew: Jewish–American Education Novels (1916–1964). Bernard Sherman. New York: Barnes; London: Yoseloff, 1969. 132–45.
    Provides a general discussion of AAM as an example of the bildungsroman done in the tradition of the Jewish–American novel. Touches on several novels and miscellaneous topics.
  • Shaw, Patrick W. "History and the Picaresque Tradition in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." CLIO 16.3 (1987): 203–19.
    Describes the rebirth of the picaresque tradition after WWII with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. Building on Judie Newman's treatment of Bellow and theories of history, Shaw argues that "verbose, indecisive, and visionary, Augie personifies American history between World War 1 and 1950" (204) and that the picaresque was the perfect form for the kind of historiography embodied within the novel.
  • Silol, Robert. "Augie March ou les balancements delicats d'un moi a la recherche de sol." Delta 19 (1984): 93–107.
    Discusses AAM as a debate on liberty; describes the duality which organizes the book; finally sees it as a "serious interrogation—a quest."
  • Tackach, James M. "Saul Bellow's Dingbat Einhorn, Nails Nagel and the American Dream." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 55–58.
    AAM is a parody of the American rags-to-riches story based on the myth that hard work, purity and virtue will bring success to even the most downtrodden. Bellow destroys that Horatio Alger myth in the episode on Einhorn and Nails Nagel.
  • Trilling, Lionel. Introduction. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. New York: Modern Library, 1965.

  • Tuttleton, James W. The Adventures of Augie March. 20th Century Novel. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970. [Cassette tape. 33 min.]

  • Warren, Robert Penn. "The Man with No Commitments." New Republic 2 Nov. 1953: 22–23. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 9–12. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 11–13.
    Sees AAM as Bellow's most important novel to date. Identifies Augie as a "latter-day example of the Emersonian ideal Yankee who could do a little of this and a little of that." Criticizes Augie for having no commitments and for being a static character.
  • Way, Brian. "Character and Society in The Adventures of Augie March." Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies ns June 1964: 36–44. Cited in Abstracts of English Studies, 1966.

  • Aithal, S. Krishnamoorthy. "American Ethnic Fiction in the Universal Human Context." American Studies International 21.5 (1983): 61–66.
    Discusses the desire of ethnic groups to move beyond ethnic boundaries and seek an identity in basic human terms. Such concerns about identiy find vivid and powerful expression in the lives and fortunes of the protagonist of AAM. Augie's identity as a Jew is the point of this novel. Though Augie comes under the spell of many destiny-molders, he eventually spurns them all. Eventually, he defines his identity not in terms of religion, race, or nationality, but in terms of human essence. Augie is a man who transcends the accidents of birth, his ethnic and national boundaries, and who impresses us primarily as a human being.
  • Alam, Fakrul. "A Possible Source of Augie's Axial Lines." Notes on Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1980): 6–7.


  • Traces the concept of the "axial lines" reference to Karl Jaspers' essay "The Axial Age of Human History," published in 1948 in Commentary, a journal to which Bellow occasionally contributed.
  • Aldridge, John W. "The Society of Three Novels." In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity. John W. Aldridge. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956. 126–48. Rpt. as "The Society of Augie March" in The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture, 1951–1971. John W. Aldridge. New York: Harper Magazine Press, 1972. 224–30.
    Sees AAM as a spiritual picaresque—a later form of the bildungsroman. Here the hero is consciousness rather than swashbuckling rogue, and as such is required to develop, deepen, strike through its first illusion to the truth, which, at the end of the road, it discovers to be its fate. But this novel begins with the aphorism that "Man's character is his fate" and ends with the aphorism transposed "man's fate is his character." The learning is in the transposition.
  • Alter, Robert. "Heirs of the Tradition." Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel. Robert Alter. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964. 106–32.
    Bellow adapts the picaresque form into the novelistic idiom of the mid-twentieth-century. Augie is a typical picaroon in his insatiable quest for experience and limitless curiosity. Alter calls the Whitmanesque catalogue sentences crammed with vitality and his vision of the world "multiverse." By refusing to fall prey to the systematizers, Augie has appeal for the modern audience. Like the typical picaroon he is appealing to both men and women. Ultimately he is an atypical picaroon because Bellow is using also the bildungs-roman model of search for self-identity. Unlike the picaroon, Augie never seeks experience for its own sake.
  • Amis, Martin. "A Chicago of a Novel." Atlantic Oct. 1995: 114–20, 122–27. Rpt. as "Why Augie Has It All."Gaurdian Supplement 4 Aug. 1995: 2–5.
    Declares that AAM is the great American novel. Suggests that the quest ended there and that it entailed a chimera, or a pig with wings. It involved an answer to the question of whether Americans had an American identity or whether America was a continental holding-camp of Greeks, Jews, Brits, Italians, Scandinavians, and Lithuanians, together with the remaining Amerindians from ice-age Mongolia. Concludes that miraculously and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home, dedicated it to his father, and published it in 1953. Its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its calmness, and its promiscuity demonstrate its quintessential Americanness. A major critical treatment of AAM.
  • Anderson, David D. "Saul Bellow's Mexican Fiesta: The Adventures of Augie March as Expatriate Spectacle." Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter. 22.3 (1992): 21–31.
    Notes the affinity Americans and American writers have always had for Mexico. Aruges that this fondness of Mexico is fully explored in AAM. Unlike his literary forebearers such as Huckleberry Finn or George Willard, Augie remains a passive hero. There is an absence of purpose, direction, faith, or even determination to escape. He dangles. Mexico is the illusion of sanctuary from a world of violence, an idea occupying twenty-six chapters of AAM. Details the events of these chapters and suggests that they compare with Huck's adventures along the river, deeper and deeper into slave territory. Sees the Leon Trotsky episode as Bellow's confession of romantic gullibility over a celebrity. Augie is Huck Finn carried forward in time.
  • Beebe, H. Keith. "Biblical Adventures in an American Novel." Journal of Bible and Religion Apr. 1959: 133–38.
    In the context of examining biblical adventures in American fiction, discusses AAM for its myriad biblical allusions. Concludes that Bellow's mind is steeped in Old and New Testament biblical stories.
  • Bergler, Edmund. "Writers of Half-Talent." American Imago 14.2 (1957): 155–64.
    Claims that Bellow is a writer of half talent, neither truly creative nor a hack. Writers in this sub-group describe persons and situations vividly. Because the characters they depict are seemingly alive, they hold the reader's interest, but something is still missing. The missing link consists of frantic avoidance of the most decisive human motivation: unconscious psychic masochism. As a result the writer piles up a plethora of "interesting" situations; he overstresses sex; he substitutes external events for internal vicissitudes. In short, his characters are static rather than dynamic.
  • Berryman, John. "A Note on Augie." The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, 1940. 222–24.
    Places AAM in the Dreiserian naturalistic tradition.
  • Bromwich, David. "Some American Masks." Dissent 20 (Winter 1973): 35–45.
    Bromwich claims that AAM comes close to being a great novel, a rallying cry and a great portent. Augie as a drifter becomes dark angel of our representative mass fictions, and yet. Concludes that Bellow relies too heavily on the reader to infer his qualities. Adds strength to the traditions of the realistic novel.
  • Buddy, Kasia. The White Boy Looks at the Black Boy.
    Discusses Bellow's friendship with Ralph Ellison and notes the proximity in publication of Bellow's review of Invisible Man, and the publication of AAM. Both won a National Book Award, and both share many formal and thematic concerns—a picaresque structure, first-person narrator, a rejection of ideological absolutism in faces of individual morality. Treats the different ways the two novels negotiate between a desire for ethnic and racial self-expression, and a liberal universalist (and individualist) agenda. Shows how both authors strive towards that great mythic hold-all, the Great American Novel, or to adapt the Great Omni-American novel. Both are bildungsroman concerned with self-fashioning protest fiction as much as they are anti-Horatio Alger novels, since niether protagonist rises. Education and assimilation are treated with great irony by both writers; both turn back to writers of the American Renaissance, and the nineteenth century European novel; both adopted a classic liberal universalist tone rejecting assessments of themselves as ethnic writers. Also, both wrote in a symbolic vernacular, in a language of true middle-of-consciousness forged from double consciousness in order to evoke ethnic stereotypes of blackness and whiteness. Both simply wanted not to be cast into ethnic designations, yet it has happened to both of them. Concludes that neither author has been viewed as omni-American, but rather as of omni-world literature.
  • Cavalcanti, Leticia N. Tavares. "'Chicago born, free style': The Picaresque in The Adventures of Augie March." Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of Language and Literature [Brazil] 15–16.1–2 (1986): 183–93.
    AAM belongs to the universal genre of the literature of the road, the moving American frontier. Sees AAM as Whitmanesque and picaresque. As pilgrim, traveler, Colombus in chains, Augie rediscovers America. Bellow's "axial lines" are the mood, matter, and mind of the pica resque in America, the point of return to the spirit of the country once conceived in liberty in 1776, matured through experience in 1865 and thoroughly revived in more recent years.
  • Chapman, Sara S. "Melville and Bellow in the Real World: Pierre and Augie March." West Virginia University Bulletin. Philological Papers 18 (1971): 51–57.
    AAM is a modern romantic novel about a typically nineteenth-century explorer-discoverer somewhat removed from the civil state, who bears many resemblances to Melville's Pierre. Pierre may be seen as a tragic prototype for the less unfortunate Augie. Both are sensitive young men through whom the respective authors attempt to reveal "what is."Both have a vision of heroism and participate in youthful tragedy. Chapman details a convincing number of parallels in the two heroes, the philosophical issues discussed and in the major themes.
  • Crozier, Robert D. "Theme in Augie March." Critique 7.3 (1965): 18–32.
    With Salinger, Bellow is the forerunner of a more maturely intellectual and spiritual America. The theme complex in AAM is a pentagonal pattern concentrating on character—fate, power, money, love, and urbanization. Underlying these are thoughts about masculine and feminine personality, history, nature, society, and civilization. All of these are dealt with in a complex relation to the action of the novel and produce splendid unity.
  • Decap, Roger. "Picaresque et Nouveau Roman: The Adventures of Augie March." Caliban 22 (1983): 69–81.
    Provides a generalized discussion of previous critical opinions on Bellow and an equally generalized series of speculative comments on distinctive features of AAM, including the element of the picaresque.
  • De Logu, Pietro. "The European Roots of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945–1985. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: English Dept., Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988. 445–50.
    Discusses first the Americanist tradition of AAM and then the great tradition of the European novel, which nourishes the language, the technique, the form, and the moral and spiritual bent of the book. Begins with the picaresque traditions and moves forward historically through the sentimental novel, bildungsroman, Goethe, and the modern tradition of the poetic novel.
  • Frohock, W. M. "Saul Bellow and his Penitent Picaro." Southwest Review 53 (Winter 1968): 36–44.
    What distinguishes this book from the older picaresque novels is its moral awareness. This is the source of its human richness. In contrast with the older picaros, Augie has interest in and affection for those around him. The fundamental tone of the novel is "matter of factness" rather than joviality. Unlike the conventional picaro, Augie lacks humor and does not live peacefully within his own skin. AAM is really a confessional novel that uses the picaresque form. Augie, unlike Holden Caulfield and the Invisible Man, is the prisoner, not of innocence, but of "un-innocence."
  • Fuchs, Daniel. "The Adventures of Augie March: The Making of a Novel." Americana-Austriaca: Beitrage zur Amerikakunde. Ed. Klaus Lanzinger. Vol. 5. Vienna: Universitats-Verlags-buchandlung, 1980. 27–50.
    Discusses what has been enlarged upon in the notebooks or discarded for a clear perception of Bellow's intention in the actual novel. A fine comparison by one of the few critics to deal with Bellow's original manuscripts. Likens Augie to Whitman in his evasion of self-definitions. Points out that Augie, while possessing the will to moral certitude, more often embraces love as his chief function. Both in its inception and in its final form the novel manifests an unresolved tension between love and use. Linguistically AAM points to activity, event, and history. The novel is best understood as a writer's expression of a particular historical moment, the revisionist liberal early 1950's. As ingenue Augie's expectations exceed his consumations. Critics have exaggerated the optimism of the book. Bellow was one of the first to register the loss of the power of positive thinking.
  • Gerbaud, Colette. "Aventure(s) et Sacre dans Les Aventures d'Augie March." Aspects du Sacre dans la Litterature Anglo-Americaine. Reims: Publications du Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire dans !es Litteratures de Langue Anglaise, 1979. 107–29.

  • Gerson, Steven M. "The New American Adam in The Adventures of Augie March." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 117–28.
    Augie is similar to the nineteenth-century Adams evident in Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. However, events in the last half of the novel leave him pessimistic, defeated, and broken—traits that are anathema to early American Adamism. Yet he does envision paradise as the fulfillment of the American dream and paradise as escape from modern dilemmas. This Adam differs from R. W. B. Lewis's model because his consciousness has been shaped by twentieth century horrors. Augie is actually Bellow's deliberate transformation of an early American Adam into a modern one.
  • Goldberg, Gerald Jay. "Life's Customer, Augie March." Critique 3.3 (1960): 15–27.
    Bellow's form is right for his content, but his content is not always right for his form. Augie is not a substantial fictional creation. There is too much emphasis on milieu and no dynamic focal point. Bellow's dual purposes create confusion. He is torn between nostalgic re-creation of an old world he has known and writing a cohesive novel. Details the points of similarity between Tom Jones and AAM. Finally points up the differences between Fielding's comic epic and Bellow's comic romance.
  • Guerard, Albert J. "Saul Bellow and the Activists: On The Adventures of Augie March." Southern Review 3 (1967): 582–96. German translation ["Saul Bellow und die Aktivisten: Uber The Adventures of Augie March") appeared in Der Amerikanische Roman im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Trans. Anton Kaes. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Berlin: Schmidt, 1974. 353–65.
    Locates Bellow among activist writers (belief in energy and vitality) such as Roth, Gold, Percy, Engel, Baldwin, Algren, Donleavy, Kerouac, Kesey, Pynchon and Wright Morris. AAM is the seminal work behind these more recent contributions. Attributes much of the activist energy in AAM to its rhetorical novelty. Relates this to technical issues arising from the use of the picaresque form and point of view problems. Accuses Bellow of lacking an accurate ear and of periodic rhetorical self-indulgence.
  • Gunn, Drewey Wayne. "The Followers of Humboldt." American and British Writers in Mexico 1556–1973. Drewey Wayne Gunn. Austin: U of Texas P, 14–36.
    A crucial chapter for background material on Alexander Von Humboldt. Has relevance for source studies in both HG and AAM.
  • Hitchens, Christopher. "The Great American Augie." Wilson Quarterly 25.1 (2001): 22–29.
    Compares The Great Gatsby and AAM in terms on how they draw strength from America, their optimism, and principles. Argues that in this novel for the first time, an immigrant is acting like a pioneer, a rightful discoverer. Discusses at length Augie's sense of his own American identity, his patriotism, and awareness of his own eligibility. Wanderlust, Augie's fundamental theme, appears in the earlier novels, while all the novels that came after it drew their confidence, lift, and breath from it.
  • Jones, David R. "The Disappointments of Maturity: Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." The Fifties.' Fiction, Poetry and Drama. Ed. Warren French. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970. 83–92.
    Discusses the conditions in Paris under which the novel was written and its relationship to the early unpublished manuscript entitled "The Crab and the Butterfly." Jones goes on to criticize the novel for its reckless strategy of flinging a hero out across the surface of a very large work, at which point he tends to lose the focus of his material. Questions also the nature of the hero with his circular motions and demented jabbering in the face of alternating demands. Comments also on the pitch of the prose. Finally, man and his city have become superficies to the novel's many successes and to its potential.
  • Levine, Paul. "Saul Bellow: The Affirmation of the Philosophical Fool." Perspective 10.4 (1959): 163–76.

  • Lewis, R. W. B. "Recent Fiction: Picaro and Pilgrim." A Time of Harvest: American Literature 1910–1960. Ed. Robert E. Spiller. American Century Series 50. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. 144–53.
    Sees Bellow as typical of post-war novelists in the sprawling picaresque nature of his fiction. Argues that he represents a cunning fusion of Anglo-American literary traditions with Yiddish tradition. Augie retains pride and isolation in his refusal to be recruited by a world not worthy of him. He is willing to take on with marvelously inadequate equipment as much of the world as is available to him without fully submitting to its determinism. He struggles tirelessly and at times absurdly to realize the full potential of his Adamic predecessor. Bellow engenders a hopeful and vulnerable sense of life in this novel.
  • Lindberg, Gary. "Playing for Real." The Confidence Man in American Literature. Gary Lindberg. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. 231–58.
    Discusses how in contemporary literature the confidence man is treated increasingly straightforwardly. Conning becomes admirable. Discusses AAM in this context. Augie comprises two traditions of American con men—'the omnivorous jack-of-all-trades and the rogue-survivor. Augie's shapeshifting becomes a mode of being as well as a means of survival.
  • Meyers, Jeffrey. "Brueghel and Augie March." American Literature 49.1 (1977): 113–19. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 83–88.
    Breughel's painting "The Misanthrope" (1568) forms a symbolic center of meaning in the complex and variegated book and expresses some of its dominant themes: the earthy pilgrimage, the relation of character and fate, pessimism about human misery, the conflict between acceptance and rejection of the world, and idealistic longing for rustic simplicity. Finally, Breughel's painting portrays three distinct ways of dealing with the hostile world: joining its corruption, making a partial renunciation, and retreating to the bucolic ideal. Augie ponders all three. However, he resists the pessimism of Breughel's "Misanthrope."
  • Nakajima, Kenji. "Freedom in The Adventures of Augie March." Kyushu American Literature 23 (May 1982): 11–24.
    Argues that as the book opens, Augie is an open personality subject to change. As he changes, he finally seeks freedom from people and from love. He ends as a solipsistic egoist.
  • Newman, Judie. "Saul Bellow and Ortega y Gasset: Fictions of Nature, History and Art in The Adventures of Augie March." Durham University Journal 77.1 (1984): 61–70. (ns 46.1).
    Contends that AAM reveals a close familiarity with Ortega's philosophy that dictates both the intellectual argument of the book and the major incidents in its plot. Newman argues that indeed the novel advances a literary manifesto that relies to a large extent on a systematic rejection of Ortega's ideas centering on an examination of the dictum that "Man has no nature, what he has is history."
  • Overbeck, Pat Trefzger. "The Women in Augie March." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10.4 (1968): 471–84.
    Overbeck contends that it is the unlettered Rebecca and the women who supplant her in Augie's life who ground him emotionally and objectify his apocalpytic vision of his independent fate. This configuration of women gives the novel its fulcrum and structural support. Traces the successive encounters with these women and shows how Augie as narrator distorts and stereotypes them into either virago or victim. Concludes that in Stella March Augie has finally acquired an understanding of women that is atypical of the contemporary male as he observes how similar to him she really is.
  • Parkinson de Saz, Sara M. "The Adventures of Augie March, de Saul Bellow: Norteamerica: Fermento de Picaros?" La picaresca.' Origenes, textos y estructuras. Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre la Picaresca organizado por el Patronato "Arcipreste de Hita." Madrid: Fundacion Universi-taria Espanola, 1979. 1177–83.
    Provides a detailed review of AAM. Relates the novel to the old Spanish picaresque tradition as well as to the contemporary North American novelistic tradition.
  • Pearce, Richard. "Looking Back at Augie March." Yiddish 6.4 (1987): 3540.
    Discusses AAM in its historical context and argues that this "fantasy holiday," as Bellow called it, is an American version of what Mikhail Bahktin calls "carnival—a crude, sometimes farcical, open, heterogeneous mode of expression, as opposed to the homogeneous, closed, serious, 'official' form. The American version is usually restrained by vestiges of Puritanism on the one hand and facile optimism on the other. Neither Walt Whitman nor Huck Finn—with whom Augie is frequently compared—could revel in the subversive, indeed destructive impulses loosened by the carnival spirit." While many Americans were shocked by its crude humor and sexuality, the figure who really approaches the carnival is not Augie but Grandma Lausch.
  • Petillon, Pierre-Yves. "Picaro en democratie [Picaro in Democracy].'' Caliban 20 (1983): 61–67.

  • Pizer, Donald. "Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March." Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Donald Pizer. Crosscurrents/Modern Critique/ New Series. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1982. 133–149.
    Discusses AAM as a novel about all the forces that compel, condition, and shape mankind, including such things as decay, death, and the shaping power of other human wills. Calls the book a naturalistic novel of ideas.
  • Popkin, Henry. "American Comedy." Kenyon Review 16 (1954): 329–34.
    AAM presents a richly comic pattern of aspiration and disaster all cast in unmistakable tones of hyperbole. Augie is constantly reminding the reader that he is not Timur, Tallyrand, Christ, Cecil Rhodes, or any other hero. Yet he dreams of greatness, commanding personalities, secret sources of power, and women with style. His adventures are faltering steps toward these ideals. Augie finally discovers that his dreams of glory have outrun his achievements. This novel is at its strongest when it is representing Augie's distinctive amalgam of aspiration, disaster, and optimism.
  • Pughe,Thomas. "Reading the Picaresque: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and More Recent Adventures." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 77:1 (1996): 59–70.
    Argues that while both novels share genetic heritage in the evolution of the picaresque novel, it seems evident that Bellow sought to develop his own distinctly modernist voice in contradistinction to the nineteenth century heritage that his text invokes. Traces the influence of Twain on AAM. Mentions specifically voice, story, modifications, and uses of satire. Argues that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and AAM are not pure picaresque novels, but hybrids: picaresque novels of formation or anti-formation in which both writers address the question what it means to be an American. Seventy years after Twain's response to the question Bellow's AAM deals with the cultural context of Chicago between the wars. However, AAM is ultimately closer to the modernists of his own time because he and Twain convey a set of common values that, generally speaking, have romantic or realistic roots. Concludes that Augie March, Holden Caulfield, and Jack Kerouac are the last true heirs of Huck Finn.
  • Riggan, William. "The Picaro." Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns.' The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1981. 38–78.
    Sees AAM directly in the picaresque tradition, unlike most modern works with their "consciously reflective and existential" concerns.
  • 586. Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Augie March's Mexican Adventures." Indian Journal of American Studies 8.2 (1978): 39–43.
    Rodrigues claims that the strange world of Thea and Mexico owes its existence to the real-life adventures of Daniel and Jule Mannix, two famous hunters in Taxco, Mexico. Bellow visited this couple in Mexico in 1940 while they were on their honeymoon. They had trained a bald eagle called Aguila which they used to capture dragon iguanas. When this episode was published by Harper's Bazaar, Mannix wanted to sue Bellow and was persuaded not to. Rodrigues goes on to detail Bellow's debt for landscape and other detail to this trip and this geographic area. He also details what Bellow borrowed from the Mannix's articles on training the eagle and concludes that Bellow's imaginative use of the material more than adequately transforms it for the purposes of fiction.
  • Rosu, Anca. "The Picaresque Technique in Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March." Analele Universitatii Bucuresti 22 (1973): 191–97.
    Describes how Bellow has adapted the method of the picaresque novel of previous centuries because it provides him with the autobiographical mode he wants, along with the appearance of simplicity, candor and ingenuousness necessary for depicting an alternate kind of hero from the typically distorted intellectual characteristic of the twentieth-century novel.
  • Sherman, Bernard. "The Adventures of Augie March." The Invention of the Jew: Jewish–American Education Novels (1916–1964). Bernard Sherman. New York: Barnes; London: Yoseloff, 1969. 132–45.
    Provides a general discussion of AAM as an example of the bildungsroman done in the tradition of the Jewish–American novel. Touches on several novels and miscellaneous topics.
  • Shaw, Patrick W. "History and the Picaresque Tradition in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." CLIO 16.3 (1987): 203–19.
    Describes the rebirth of the picaresque tradition after WWII with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. Building on Judie Newman's treatment of Bellow and theories of history, Shaw argues that "verbose, indecisive, and visionary, Augie personifies American history between World War 1 and 1950" (204) and that the picaresque was the perfect form for the kind of historiography embodied within the novel.
  • Silol, Robert. "Augie March ou les balancements delicats d'un moi a la recherche de sol." Delta 19 (1984): 93–107.
    Discusses AAM as a debate on liberty; describes the duality which organizes the book; finally sees it as a "serious interrogation—a quest."
  • Tackach, James M. "Saul Bellow's Dingbat Einhorn, Nails Nagel and the American Dream." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 55–58.
    AAM is a parody of the American rags-to-riches story based on the myth that hard work, purity and virtue will bring success to even the most downtrodden. Bellow destroys that Horatio Alger myth in the episode on Einhorn and Nails Nagel.
  • Trilling, Lionel. Introduction. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. New York: Modern Library, 1965.

  • Tuttleton, James W. The Adventures of Augie March. 20th Century Novel. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970. [Cassette tape. 33 min.]

  • Warren, Robert Penn. "The Man with No Commitments." New Republic 2 Nov. 1953: 22–23. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 9–12. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 11–13.
    Sees AAM as Bellow's most important novel to date. Identifies Augie as a "latter-day example of the Emersonian ideal Yankee who could do a little of this and a little of that." Criticizes Augie for having no commitments and for being a static character.
  • Way, Brian. "Character and Society in The Adventures of Augie March." Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies ns June 1964: 36–44. Cited in Abstracts of English Studies, 1966.

  • Yu-cheng, Lee. "Myth and Ritual in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." Mei Kuo Yen Chiu. [American Studies] [China] 10:3 (1980): 81–111.
    Describes AAM as a young man's psychic pilgrimage containing Bellow's inexhaustible experiences with his Chicago childhood before the Great Depression and a journey ending with his sojourn in Paris after World War II. Discusses in detail this bildungsroman. A major summary of the commentary on this novel.

  • Codde, Philippe. “‘[H]ere on Strange Contingencies’: The Adventures of Augie March and Prewar French Existentialism.” Saul Bellow Journal 20.1 (2004): 20–32.


    States the changes that took place in Bellow’s oeuvre with the publication of AAM concern two elements of Bellow’s art in particular: the change into a free-wheeling style and vital change of scenery. Observes Augie’s new quest takes him out of the settings of DM and TV into travelling all around the world. Unlike the two earlier protagonists, Augie never abandons his search for identity and acceptance of his fate. Concludes that, far from having a positive ending, AAM ends with a reference to a Holocaust perpetrator with whom Augie has no qualms about profiting from the war—even in its basest form—and that instead of beating the universal master plan, he has merely moved up (or perhaps down) one stop from petty thief to objectionable crook. 

  • Kriegel, Leonard. “Wrestling with Augie March.” Nation. 23 June 2003. 27–32. Print.


    A major essay. Begins with the observation that AAM is heroic plebian “writer” figure. Augie, offspring of immigrants, with a voice that achieves a singularity seldom found in fiction succeeds in possessing America—seizing its language for his own. Augie is an urban luftmensch in a fresh world, and a half-century later, it can still evoke envy and hammer at the pulse of memory. Augie believes that destiny must reflect meaning in life; he envisions himself as an American in search of the world. Contains much biographical commentary on his early and most recent encounter with the book. Concludes that we must all, like Augie, serve as our Columbus.

  • Shere, Jeremy. “‘[G]Loving the Knuckles’: Reading Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March as a Response to the Question of Postwar, American Jewish Culture.” Saul Bellow Journal 20.1 (2004): 87–101. Print.


    Claims that in order to understand AAM, we need to understand the intellectual and social context in which Bellow’s vision as both a Jewish and American writer took place in the post-WWII moment. AAM reflects the ambivalence among Jewish intellectuals concerning assimilation into the American cultural mainstream and the prospects that a Jewish culture indigenous to America would experience as a result of this movement from margin of culture to its center. The Jewish-American forces at work in this novel clash and compete, resulting in contention and something less integrated. Concludes that AAM represents one of the more fully-realized products of postwar American-Jewish culture and at the same time troubles the very notion of such a culture by highlighting the ambivalence at its heart. The cycle of change and assimilation for Jews is never complete. Augie in the final pages of the novel is emblematic of the modern Jewish universal condition. 

  • Siegel, Ben. “The Terms of the Contract: Saul Bellow (1915–2005).” Saul Bellow Journal 20.1 (2004): 3–5. Print.


    Recalls his initial encounter with AAM, the post-WWII years of discovering American literature, the emergence of Jewish American literature as a genre, Bellow’s succession of novels and his insistence on the importance of an individual besieged by an age of political, economic, and religious turmoil, changing science and technology, and of shifting national and international borders. Pays homage to Bellow who for six decades shed light on man’s foibles and posturing. Rereading Bellow pages evokes the humor and the laughter behind the magic of these pages. 

  • Sternlicht, Sanford. “Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953).” Masterpieces of Jewish American Literature. Westport: Greewood Press, 2007. 75–83. Print.


    A detailed article. Provides a context for the emergence of AAM in 1953, provides extensive biographical material, analyzes the plot content and development, describes character development, themes, narrative style, Chicago in the 1920s, and includes suggested readings.

Reviews

  • Amis, Kingsley. Spectator 21 May 1954: 626.

  • "Broadening the Mind." Times Literary Supplement 4 June 1954: 357.

  • Cassidy, T. E. "From Chicago." Commonweal 2 Oct. 1953: 636.

  • Connole, John M. "The Adventures of Augie March." America 31 Oct. 1953: 133–34.

  • Crane, Milton. "Sprawling, Episodic Tale of a Chicagoan." Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books 20 Sept. 1953: 4.

  • Davis, Robert Gorham. "Augie Just Wouldn't Settle Down." New York Times Book Review 20 Sept. 1953: 1, 36.

  • Finn, James. Chicago Review 8.2 (1954): 104–11.

  • Geismar, Maxwell. "The Crazy Mask of Literature." Nation 14 Nov. 1953: 404.

  • Harwell, Meade. "Picaro from Chicago." Southwest Review 39 (1954): 273–76.

  • Hicks, Granville. "Two New Novels of Life's Mystery by Wright Morris and Saul Bellow." New Leader 21 Sept. 1953: 23–24.

  • Kristol, Irving. "American Ghosts." Encounter July 1954: 73–75.

  • Mizener, Arthur. "Portrait of an American, Chicago Born." New York Herald Tribune Book Review 20 Sept. 1953: 2.

  • Pickrel, Paul. "Outstanding Novels." Yale Review 43.1 (1953): x.

  • Podhoretz, Norman. "The Language of Life." Commentary Oct. 1953: 378–82. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 14–18.

  • Prescott, Orville. "Books of the Times." New York Times 18 Sept. 1953: 21.

  • "What Makes Augie Run." Time 21 Sept. 1953: 114, 117.

  • Wilson, Angus. "Out of the Ordinary." Observer [London] 9 May 1954: 9.

  • Priestley, J. B. "A Novel on the Heroic Scale." Sunday Times 9 May 1954: 5.

  • Pritchett, V. S. "That Time and That Wilderness." New Statesman 28 Sept. 1962: 405–6.

  • Rolo, Charles J. "A Rolling Stone." Atlantic Oct. 1953: 86–87.

  • Rosenberg, Dorothy. "Augie March Travels from Chicago to Paris—Looking for Himself." San Francisco Sunday Chronicle 25 Oct. 1953: 18.

  • "Rough Life." Newsweek 21 Sept. 1953: 102–103.

  • Schorer, Mark. "A Book of Yes and No." Hudson Review 7.1 (1954): 136–41.

  • Schwartz, Delmore. "Adventure in America." Partisan Review 21.1 (1954): 112–15. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 8–10.

  • Webster, Howey Curtis. "Quest Through the Modern World." Saturday Review 19 Sept. 1953: 13–14.

  • West, Anthony. "A Crash of Symbols." New Yorker 26 Sept. 1953: 140, 142, 145.

  • West, Ray B., Jr. Shenandoah 5.1 (1953): 85–90.