num_pages: 536
description: 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. 
language: English
title: The Adventures of Augie March
titlecomplete: The Adventures of Augie March
characters: Mrs. Renling, Augie March, Grandma Lausch, Charlotte Magnus, Thea Fenchel, Arthur Einhorn, Mimi Villars, Lucy Magnus, William Einhorn, Simon March, Clem Tambow, Kayo Obermark, Manny Padilla, Mintouchian
genres: Fiction, American, Jewish, Literature, Classics, Novels, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Audiobook
ratings_count: 17892
places: Paris, Chicago, Illinois, Mexico
awards: awardedAt: -504892800000
name: National Book Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Penguin Books