The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel follows Chicagoan Augie March through changing jobs and relationships as he searches for identity and freedom.
Bildungsroman: A novel tracing a protagonist’s development from youth toward adulthood and self-understanding. Augie’s changing experiences and judgments make the novel a distinctive coming-of-age story.
Saul Bellow: An American novelist and short-story writer whose works include The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow wrote the novel and made its exuberant first-person voice central to its style.
Great Depression: A worldwide economic crisis beginning in 1929, marked by severe unemployment and financial hardship. Its aftermath informs the economic insecurity surrounding Augie’s early jobs and family.
American naturalism: A literary movement depicting human lives as shaped by heredity, environment, and social forces. Bellow gives Augie room for choice and reinvention where naturalist fiction stresses constraint.
Picaresque novel: A narrative following a roguish protagonist through episodic adventures among varied social settings. Augie’s successive schemes and jobs give the novel a picaresque structure.
Don Quixote: A novel by Miguel de Cervantes about an idealistic man whose imagined chivalric world collides with reality. Augie’s freedom-seeking recalls quixotic idealism, though his adventures remain rooted in modern Chicago.
Jewish American literature: Writing by Jewish American authors that engages Jewish life, identity, history, and culture in the United States. The March family’s immigrant background and Chicago community place the novel within this tradition.
Modernism: A broad cultural movement that challenged inherited forms and conventions in the early twentieth century. The novel’s expansive, comic storytelling differs from modernism’s frequent formal fragmentation.
First-person narrative: A narrative told by a character using first-person pronouns, limiting events to that character’s perspective. Augie’s voice turns his adventures into a retrospective account of self-making.
Machiavelli: A Renaissance political thinker whose writings examine power, practical judgment, and political conduct. The novel’s epigraph invokes Machiavelli’s contrast between fortune and human effort.