The Adventures of Augie March, which appeared in 1953, is possibly his most exuberant and nostalgic book. Many commentators have pointed out that Bellow's use of Chicago in the early novels proceeded from his self-conscious association with H. G. Wells, who wrote of London; Joyce, who wrote of Dublin; and Arnold Bennet, who wrote about his Five Towns. In it we see Bellow's first open rejection of the modern tradition. The world had not come to an end as Joyce and Lawrence predicted. The disintegrating self of early modern literature had actually survived two world wars, the Holocaust, the technological revolution, and the effects of mass society. And even though the typically modern phenomenon of the alienated hero, the wasteland, and the absurd world continue to appear in twentieth-century literature right up to the present decade, many writers, of whom Bellow was notably one of the first, began as early as 1940 to question the validity of modernist estimates of man and society. Written as a contemporary bildungsroman, and picaresque adventure chronicle, it is the coming-of-age novel of the larky Augie March. Here Bellow has provided a remarkable account of Augie and Simon Marches fatherless family comprised of his rather gentle and witless mother, and adopted Grandma Lausch, and her poodle, Winnie. It is essentially the record of Bellow's own immersion in an immigrant Chicago neighborhood done in minute realistic detail. Though it now seems somewhat of a social realist period piece, it is a lively, boisterous comedy about the divergent paths taken by the two brothers as they respond to the CASP legacy of entreprenurial America. 

This questioning, begun tentatively in The Dangling Man and The Victim, becomes a major theme in all of the subsequent novels through to Humboldt's Gift (1975). Probably it coincided with the translation of French existentialist fiction by Camus and Sartre in the Partisan Review during the 1940s. Beginning with The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow depicts a series of romantic heroes, men of sensibility and often of learning, who spend their brief fictional lives rejecting philosophical skepticism and courtship of the void. The revisionist view of the world that the respective protagonists emerge with is a deep and, at times, a quasi-mystical affirmation of the transcendent value of self and existence. Along with this is their clear sense of the sacredness of the social contract. 

This sprawling and seemingly lighthearted novel abandons the tight organic structures of the modernist novel and its philosophical gloominess. Using a classic picaresque form and hero, Bellow depicts Augie March as a contemplator, receiver, and opposer of action in the world. Written in a uniquely idiomatic Chicagoan-American English, the novel depicts an American picaro. It was conceived and written in Paris immediately after Bellow had abandoned work on a 100,000-word manuscript entitled "The Crab and the Butterfly." Bellow told interviewer Bruce Cook he worked his way out of depression over Paris and this failed manuscript by taking "a fantasy holiday," with the writing of Augie's story. Bellow's cumulative comments on the genesis of this novel range over twenty-two years and provide clues to its exuberant anti-modernist stance. In 1953 he told Harvey Breit: "It just came to me. . . . The great pleasure of the book was that it came easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it." Ten years later he explained the unprecedented comic elements in Augie March to David Galloway: "I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution." However, in this same interview, he disclosed his anxiety about confronting a WASP world view, letting go his inhibitions, abandoning his former Flaubertian standard, and making a case for the Russian immigrant experience and its language habits. He expressly did not want it to be a proper book. Instead he wanted to depict a picaro journeying through the transitional world of an American immigrant social history coterminous with his own youth. Into the mixture went Cervantesque chivalric allusion, mock-heroic comparison of ancient and modern-day heroes, wacky humor, personal family history, classical lore, Dreiserian naturalism, Whitmanesque catalogues, Dickensian caricature, Hogarthian character portraits, the vernacular language of street, bar, and poolroom, Chicago immigrant accents, eccentric philosophical essays, Bellovian homily, and Jewish wit. The result is a novel of mixed accomplishments. Central to the moral issues and the case for optimism set up in the novel is the comparison between two brothers--Augie the optimist, and Simon the cynical materialist. This dialectical juxtaposition of pairs of brothers, or alter egos, becomes a hallmark of Bellow's fiction. The fascinating assortment of character portraits evokes a feeling that arises from the middle ground lying exactly halfway between romantic idealism and existentialist nihilism, a middle ground which brings romance, comedy, and classical realism into conjunction. Here are all the lovingly evoked scenes from Chicago, immigrant portraits--the whole racial mix of the depression-period immigrant population of Chicago whom Bellow often calls the multitudes of the Holy Writ. These are not the usual alienated, urbanized city masses of the Sartrean novel. Likewise, there is the transcendental premise upon which the novel is based. With Heraclitus, Bellow and Augie believe fate to be determined by character, not by biology or environment. It is a flat denial of historicism--the idea that twentieth-century men and women live at the "dwarf-end of times." Speaking in 1973 to Joyce Illig, Bellow explained the significance of Chicago in his novels: 

All of civilized mankind is entering this peculiar condition in which we were pioneers. That's why Chicago is significant. We experienced it before the others did. We experienced the contemporary condition before others were aware of it. . . . Chicago is, I believe, the symbol of it. In Chicago, things were done for the first time, which the rest of the world later learned and imitated. Capitalist production was pioneered in the stockyards, in refrigerator cars, in the creation of the Pullman, in the creation of farm machinery, and with it also certain urban political phenomena which are associated with the new condition of modern democracy. All that happened here. It happened early. 

A Robinson Crusoe and an American Adam, Augie realizes ultimately that evil is timeless and universal and has no particular connections with the present age or any other. Far from being a victim, he is able to use his capacity for opposition to choose resistance: 

I have a feeling . . . about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is mere clownery, hiding tragedy. . . . lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When the striving stops, there they are as a gift. . . . Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion and chatter, distraction, effort, and superfluity, passed off like something unreal. 

Unlike Joseph and Asa, Augie March is much less trapped in a masculine world, more generous in his trust in women, and generally less misanthropic. Bellow's portraits of men and women in this text evoke fewer stereotypes than in either earlier or later works, and include such remarkable portraits as that of Grandma Lausch. Neither is the solution of the celibate retreat from the feminine erotic as pronounced in this book. Augie is a new kind of American hero who still demands a certain kind of freedom, but who in late middle-age as he finishes his comic heroic account of himself and his age is still in search of his fate.