The Adventures of Augie March

Summary

Augie March narrates his own coming-of-age across Depression-era Chicago and beyond, drifting through jobs, mentors, lovers, and schemes while resisting any single fate others try to impose on him. Bellow's exuberant, Whitmanic voice broke from the spare prose then in vogue and helped open American fiction to immigrant, Jewish, and urban experience. The novel is often cited as the moment a distinctive postwar American voice arrived.