If you're intrigued by characters who navigate through disorder with a voracious zest for life, "The Adventures of Augie March" could resonate with you. Bellow's prose captures the colorful tapestry of American life during the Great Depression, through the eyes of an adventurer whose trials and tribulations are rendered with vitality and deep humanity. The narrative's unpredictable twists mirror the unpredictability of life itself, and the vivid, richly detailed set pieces turn Augie's education into a universal exploration of the strange and the familiar.

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• National Book Award for Fiction (1954)

Much of The Adventures of Augie March  takes place during the Great Depression, but far from being a chronicle of deprivation, the first of Saul Bellow’s string of masterpieces testifies to the explosive richness of life when it is lived at high risk and in tumultuous social circumstances.In a brawling Chicago of crooks, con artists, second-story men, extravagant dreamers, snappy dressers, and cold-eyed pragmatists, Augie March undergoes his sentimental education—an education that, though imbued with reality, will take him into realms progressively stranger, more marvelous, more filled with indecipherable meaning. The Adventures of Augie March  is the product of an elegant and skeptical mind on which nothing is lost, and of an appetite for the look and feel of things that is both enormous and passionate. The result of these varying felicities is a novel that is immediate, strikingly unpredictable, authentic, and convincing.

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