The Adventures of Augie March

Based on Wikipedia: The Adventures of Augie March

The Great American Anti-Hero

"I am an American, Chicago born." With those six words, Saul Bellow launched one of the most celebrated novels in American literature. The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953, begins with a declaration of identity that echoes like a jazz riff throughout its pages. But here's the twist: the novel is really about a man who never quite figures out who he is.

This isn't your typical rags-to-riches American story. It's something far more interesting—and far more honest.

A Boy from the Chicago Streets

Augie March grows up during the Great Depression in the rough neighborhoods of Chicago. He has two brothers: Simon, who burns with ambition, and George, who suffers from an intellectual disability. Their father is absent—not dead, just gone—and their mother is slowly losing her eyesight. The household is ruled by a tyrannical boarder the children call Grandma Lausch, though she isn't related to them at all.

The circumstances are humble, to put it mildly. But Augie possesses something that should make him destined for greatness in the American imagination: he's intelligent, observant, compassionate, and genuinely likable. He reads voraciously. He thinks deeply about life. He has, as they say, potential.

The novel follows him from this hardscrabble boyhood into young adulthood, tracing his encounters, his jobs, his loves, and his endless drifting. This structure makes it what literary scholars call a picaresque novel—a story that follows a roguish hero through a series of loosely connected adventures. Think of it as the novelistic equivalent of a road trip with no particular destination.

The Education of Augie March

Throughout the book, people keep trying to educate Augie. They see his mind, his potential, and they want to shape him into something. But something always gets in the way. A new opportunity arises. A new person enters his life. A crisis demands attention. Education becomes the road not taken, again and again.

Instead, Augie gets his schooling from life itself. He works as a general assistant to Einhorn, a local businessman with a touch of corruption—enough to be interesting, not enough to be dangerous. He helps out in a dog training parlor. He works at a coal-tip for his brother Simon, who has married into money and adopted its values wholesale. He organizes for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the labor federation that was reshaping American work in the 1930s.

Each job teaches him something. None of them sticks.

The Women in Augie's Life

Women are drawn to Augie March. He has that quality—openness, perhaps, or a certain gentleness that makes people want to claim him. The Renlings, a wealthy couple, practically try to adopt him, showering him with fine clothes and social polish. He gets engaged to Lucy Magnus, a wealthy cousin of his brother's wife. But a scandal erupts—not of his making—and the engagement dissolves.

Then there's Sophie, a Greek hotel maid with whom he has a casual affair. And then there's Thea.

Thea Fenchel is something else entirely.

Augie had met Thea years earlier, when he was living with the Renlings. He was actually in love with her sister at the time. But Thea looked at him and told him, with eerie certainty, that they would end up together someday.

She was right. Years later, Thea sweeps back into his life and carries him off to Mexico on what may be the strangest adventure in American literature. Her plan? To train an eagle to hunt giant lizards.

This is not a metaphor. This is literally what she wants to do.

The Eagle and the Lizards

The Mexico sequence is unforgettable. Picture it: the wild, irrepressible Thea, consumed by her vision of hunting iguanas with a trained eagle. Augie, swept along by her intensity, trying to make himself believe in this impossible project. The eagle itself, a magnificent creature that refuses to cooperate with human schemes.

It doesn't work, of course. The eagle won't hunt. Augie suffers a terrible accident on a horse. He and Thea begin to drift apart—he playing cards in town, she searching the mountains for snakes and lizards to study. Their relationship finally shatters when Augie agrees to drive another woman, Stella, to a different town to escape her troubled boyfriend.

It wasn't an affair. But it was enough.

The Drift Continues

After Mexico, Augie returns to Chicago. He picks things back up with Sophie for a while. Eventually, the Second World War catches up with him, and he joins the merchant navy. In New York, waiting for deployment, he encounters Stella again. This time, they marry.

The war gives Augie his most harrowing experience. His ship is torpedoed and sunk. He ends up in a lifeboat with another survivor who turns out to be a lunatic—a man who believes he has discovered the secret biological basis of evil and wants to establish laboratories around the world to study and eliminate it. Days in a small boat with a madman, drifting on an indifferent ocean.

Augie survives, as he always does. He's rescued. He returns to Stella.

The book ends with them living in France after the war. Their existence is "slightly dubious," as one might put it. Augie is involved in some fairly shady business dealings. Stella is trying to become an actress. Nothing is quite settled. Nothing is quite right. But nothing is quite wrong either.

Life goes on. Augie drifts.

The Radical Failure of the American Dream

Here's what makes The Adventures of Augie March genuinely subversive. Bellow gives Augie everything that American mythology says should lead to success. He comes from poverty—the classic starting point for the self-made man. He doesn't know his father, which frees him from inherited expectations. He refuses to be trapped by material things. He's smart, he's good-hearted, he sees clearly.

And yet.

Augie never becomes a hero. He never achieves anything. He makes no mark on the world.

Why? Because he never commits. He never decides what he actually wants. He has deep enthusiasm exactly twice in the entire novel—both times falling in love. The first time fails completely. The second time, with Stella, is failing as the book ends.

Everyone around Augie finds more success than he does. Not because they're smarter or more talented, but because they commit to something. Simon commits to money and status. Thea commits to her wild visions. Even the minor characters pursue their goals with dedication, however modest those goals might be.

Augie keeps waiting for his "better fate." He's convinced he deserves something special, something grand, something that matches the potential everyone sees in him. So he keeps saying no to the opportunities in front of him. He keeps drifting, certain that the real thing is just around the corner.

It never comes.

Bellow's Argument

Through Augie, Bellow makes a case that would have been heresy in 1950s America: a sharp mind and pure ideals are worthless if they're not coupled with active pursuit and genuine engagement with the world. Intelligence isn't enough. Good intentions aren't enough. Even being a fundamentally decent person isn't enough.

You have to commit. You have to choose. You have to do.

This was radical in an era that celebrated the American dreamer, the man who refuses to settle, the restless spirit always seeking something more. Bellow suggests that such a man might just be afraid to actually live his life.

The Novel's Place in Literature

The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1954. Both Time magazine and the Modern Library Board named it one of the hundred best novels in the English language. It established Bellow as a major American writer—a position he would cement with subsequent novels like Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, and Seize the Day, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.

Critics have compared Augie March to some of the greatest American novels. It shares DNA with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—another story of a young man drifting through American society, encountering its contradictions. It has the ambitious scope of Moby-Dick. It captures the alienation of youth like The Catcher in the Rye, though Augie lacks Holden Caulfield's bitter edge.

What these novels share is a preoccupation with the quest for identity in America—a country that promises you can be anything, but offers little guidance on what that should actually mean.

The Style Revolution

Beyond its themes, Augie March represented a revolution in style. American literature in the early twentieth century had been dominated by spare, controlled prose—think Hemingway's clipped sentences, Fitzgerald's elegant restraint. Bellow threw that out the window.

His prose is exuberant, digressive, stuffed with observations and asides. It tumbles forward like someone talking excitedly, unable to contain all the thoughts rushing to get out. The novel is long and loose, following Augie's wandering path without the tight plot structure readers might expect.

Bellow was doing something new: combining the intellectual ambition of European literature with the energy and vernacular of American speech. He showed that a serious novel could also be fun to read, that profundity didn't require solemnity.

Echoes in Culture

The novel's influence extends beyond literature. The Australian band Augie March—known for their literary, descriptive lyrics—took their name directly from Bellow's protagonist. Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan references the book in his song "Put a Penny in the Slot." The 2012 science fiction film Antiviral, directed by Brandon Cronenberg, named its protagonist Syd March as an homage to Augie.

These connections aren't surprising. Augie March is a character type that resonates across generations: the person with all the talent in the world who somehow can't quite get it together. We all know someone like that. Some of us suspect we might be someone like that.

Reading Augie Today

Seventy years after its publication, The Adventures of Augie March remains startlingly relevant. We live in an age of infinite possibility—or at least, the promise of infinite possibility. Social media shows us countless paths we could take. The economy demands flexibility, adaptability, the willingness to reinvent ourselves. The old certainties about career and family and purpose have eroded.

In this context, Augie's paralysis feels less like a personal failing and more like a prophecy. When you can be anything, how do you choose what to be? When every commitment means closing off other options, why commit at all? When everyone keeps telling you that you have potential, what happens when you never quite fulfill it?

Bellow doesn't offer easy answers. The novel ends with Augie still drifting, still waiting for his better fate, still "larking and laughing" despite everything. Maybe that's okay. Maybe the drifting is the point. Or maybe it's a gentle warning about what happens when we never quite get around to living our lives.

Either way, it's a story worth reading—or listening to, as Speechify carries you through Bellow's rollicking sentences, through Depression-era Chicago and wartime oceans and postwar France, through the adventures of a man who could have been anything, and so became nothing in particular, and so became unforgettable.