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HISTORY:The Adventures of Augie March, the third novel by Saul (C.) Bellow (1915-2005) and the one that marked his maturity as a major American writer, was published in the fall of 1953. Set in Depression-era Chicago, the novel follows the adventures of Augie March, a street-smart, ambitious, and intellectual son of immigrant Russian Jewish parents. Reviews prominently featured in such journals as the New York Times Book Review and the Saturday Review of Literature revealed a critical ambiguity that continues to prevail.

The nature of these reviews reflects not only critics' attitudes but also Bellow's attitude toward the novel after its publication and in following years. Although he defended the novel against what he considered undue criticism, he is quoted in "The Art of Fiction XXXVII," Paris Review 36 (Winter 1966): 48–73, as thinking the novel too excessive and its style and structure in need of restraint (54). Nevertheless, in the same interview he said that he had written Augie March with "a great sense of freedom" (57). Later, in a May 1997 Playboy interview (59+), he asserted that Augie March had liberated the American novel from "the English mandarin influence," as well as from Hemingway's (68). Hemingway, Bellow explained, "was a very marvelous and beautiful writer who was constricting. He produced novels with a highly polished surface. You didn't want to mar the surface of his beautifully constructed and polished stories or novels. But then it was too narrowing, because there were all kinds of experience which would never fit into that" (68). Significantly, the novel received the 1954 National Book Award for Fiction.

The critical ambiguity with which the novel has been regarded by reviewers, scholars, and Bellow himself may well be the result of what Bellow planned to do in the novel, as well as of the complex history of the novel's composition. Augie March appeared more than six years after the publication of The Victim in 1947. In that six-year period Bellow signed a contract for and abandoned a novel tentatively called The Crab and the Butterfly. He also applied for and, after two unsuccessful earlier applications, received a Guggenheim Award for $2,500, which he planned to spend on a year in Paris. Above all, he wrote, first on the novel that was later aborted and on other writing projects and then, increasingly furiously, on what was to become The Adventures of Augie March. The first tangible manifestation of the novel-to-be appeared in the November 1949 Partisan Review and was titled "From the Life of Augie March." In 1953 it would become chapter 1 of The Adventures of Augie March.

Subsequent appearances of works obviously related to the developing novel were frequent. "The Coblins," later to be chapter 2 of Augie March, appeared in the Autumn 1951 Sewanee Review. "The Einhorns," later to be chapter 5, appeared in the November- December 1951 Partisan Review and was reprinted in the Winter 1953 Perspectives USA. "Interval in a Lifeboat," later to be chapter 25, appeared in the December 27, 1952, New Yorker. "The Eagle," later to be chapters 15 and 16, was published in the February 1953 Harper's Bazaar, and "Mintouchian," later to be chapter 24, appeared in the Summer 1953 Hudson Review.

The Adventures of Augie March was largely the product of Bellow's Guggenheim, which gave him the freedom to write, as well as a unique perspective on his past. Both are evident throughout the novel. Freed from the relative formalism of his first two novels, as well as the perspective that governed both, he wrote furiously in a series of Parisian apartments, on cafe tabletops, and during excursions outside Paris. He was possessed by an exuberance he later decried, but also by the innocent adventurousness he discovered in his Midwestern antecedents from Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), writing as Mark Twain, to Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), an influence he also later decried. He produced stories: "Dora" (Harper's Bazaar, November 1949, "Address by Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago" (Hudson Review, Summer 1951), "A Sermon by Dr. Pep" (Partisan Review, May 1949), and others, but above all he worked on Augie March. When Bellow returned to the united States after his Guggenheim was not renewed, employment and a place to live became major problems. But after his slow tour of Europe, capped by six weeks of writing in Rome, he had the manuscript, more than 100,000 words long, well in hand.

Later, in an essay in the January 31, 1954, New York Times Book Review titled "How I Wrote Augie March's Story," he recounted his writing odyssey through southern Europe, concluding with the months back in the States during which he finished the novel: at the apartment of a friend, in a cold-water flat, in a Seattle hotel, in an Oregon motel, at the Yaddo artists' community, and even in Pennsylvania Station, a Broadway hotel, and the Princeton Library (3, 17). Oddly, however, he commented that not a single word of the novel was written in Chicago. With a one-year appointment as a creative-writing fellow at Princeton and with the novel finally at Viking, scheduled for spring 1953 publication, his first marriage ended but another on the horizon, Bellow felt confident about the future.

The novel was published at an auspicious time. Prominent critics had proclaimed the death of the traditional American novel even though the form endured; in the June 15, 1952, New York Times Book Review column "Speaking of Books," Diana Trilling (2) and, one week later in the June 22 issue, John W. Aldridge had lamented the novel's demise (2). Others hoped that their pessimism would be refuted and believed that new young Jewish writers, Bellow among them, would introduce a new dimension into the American literary canon. The Adventures of Augie March was awaited with strong anticipation. Meanwhile, in a review of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) in the June 1952 issue of Commentary, Bellow insisted that the novel was hearty and strong, using Ellison's novel to support his almost passionate claims (608–10).

Before publication, the novel's success was clear. It was a selection by Readers' Subscription and an alternate selection by Book-of-the-Month Club, and it received enthusiastic blurbs by Robert Penn Warren and Lionel Trilling, as well as strong praise by Clifton Fadiman. By and large, these pre-publication comments anticipated the post-publication reactions of prominent critics, both in the United States and abroad, often because they were so different. Pronouncements in the prepublication blurbs were invariably positive; the post-publication reviews were almost invariably tentative, if not ambiguous. Most reviewers were not sure what Bellow was trying to do, and most disliked his style. Nevertheless, most were sure that it was an important work.

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