The Adventures of Augie March
By Saul Bellow
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens
Viking Press 50th Anniversary Edition
Book in fine condition. Dust jacket in fine condition with a small blemish (from sticker removed) and slight wrinkle in front, bottom-right corner.
From inside the jacket:
Once in a while, an original masterpiece is presented to the public. Augie March was recognized as such an original when it was published fifty years ago—September 18, 1953. Clifton Fadiman wrote: "We have not had, since Huckleberry Finn, any novel with better claims to be a genuine picaresque than Mr. Bellow's." Not only was the novel keenly humorous and highly spirited, it also mingled street language and literary elegance with an energy and freshness seldom seen.
Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero, is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the depression. His mother, deserted by her husband, has taken in a tough old boarder, Grandma Lausch, who rules the family—slow-witted Georgie, ambitious Simon, super-observant Augie—like a benevolent despot. Augie's friends set out to make their fortunes in various ways, but he sees himself as chosen for a special destiny. A "born recruit," he makes himself available for a series of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as unworthy. Instead of allowing himself to be drafted, he takes matters into his own hands. The choices that he makes independently are—to say the least—eccentric.
"Life among the Machiavellians" is the subtitle Mr. Bellow privately chooses to describe the ups and downs of Augie's unsteady life. Augie's own oddity is reflected in the companions he encounters—plungers, schemers, risk-takers, "hole-in-corner" operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures.
More than once, critics have described The Adventures of Augie March as the Great American Novel. "There is no novelist around from whom we have a right to expect more than from Saul Bellow," wrote Robert Penn Warren. In the words of Alfred Kazin: "In its verve, its force, its seemingly endless narrative resource, its audacity of style, and above all its close mastery of the whole American scene, it seems to me head and shoulders above most contemporary novels and is plainly one of the of riches of twentieth-century American Novels."
In this fiftieth-anniversary reissue, with its introduction by Christopher Hitchens, this extraordinary novel is made available to a new generation of readers.
