Augie March: 1953 Publication & Reviews

The publication of The Adventures of Augie March by the Viking Press in 1953 won Saul Bellow national recognition and an immense public readership, launching him to fame and fortune. Reviews of the novel in major publications hailed Bellow as an American literary talent worthy of comparison to Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. The novel sold briskly. In 1954, Augie was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction. The spotlight of literary celebrity shone brightly on 39-year-old writer Bellow, who had succeeded, he wrote privately to a friend, in “proving that a young man from Chicago had the right to claim the world’s attention.”