The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The best postwar American novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), magnificently terminates and fulfills the line of Melville, Twain, and Whitman," acclaimed James Wood in The New Republic. Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow's modern picaresque takes his unlikely hero--a poor Chicago boy--on a wild ride that grandly illustrates twentieth-century man's restless pursuit of an elusive meaning.

SYNOPSIS

This National Book Award-winning novel takes place in Depression-era Chicago and is not only a testimony on human nature but also of the drive to succeed. The novel follows the adventures of a lifelong dreamer named Augie March, who only through failure after failure finally succeeds in the end. The novel recreates life during the Depression and is filled with memorable characters.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert Gorham Davis - The New York Times, 1953

In writing a long, crowded picaresque narrative of ups and downs of fortune, letting the hero tell his own life history in the first person, Mr. Bellow goes back to the earliest and most generic form of the novel. It is a form which has always been congenial to observant humorists who relish human variety, who are fertile in creating characters and who are not afraid to seem more interested in life than in art.

Martin Amis - The Atlantic Monthly

The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold 42 years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do; it ended.

Christopher Hitchens - The Wilson Quarterly

I do not set up as a member of the jury in the Great American Novel contest, if only because I￯﾿ﾽd prefer to see the white whale evade capture a while longer. It￯﾿ﾽs more interesting that way. However, we do belong to a ranking species, and there￯﾿ﾽs no denying that the contest is a real one. The advantage The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow￯﾿ﾽs third novel, has over The Great Gatsby (1925), which, coincidentally, was F. Scott Fitzgerald￯﾿ﾽs third novel too, derives from its scope, its optimism, and, I would venture, its principles.... Not much in Bellow￯﾿ﾽs preceding work prepared readers for The Adventures of Augie March. It￯﾿ﾽs not necessary to believe, as I do, that the novel is the summit of his career (he has published 19 books to date), but let￯﾿ﾽs call Augie his gold standard.

Library Journal

Bellow's 1953 novel is among the first crop in Penguin's new "Great Books of the 20th Century" series, which will see 15 additional volumes published through January 2000. Each is a quality trade-size paperback on heavy, ragged-edged, acid-free paper. Volumes range from Conrad's 1902 Heart of Darkness to Toni Morrison's 1987 Beloved. Prices will run from roughly $10.95 to $14.95. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The New Republic