The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow - Leonard Kriegel (essay date 23 June 2003)
Leonard Kriegel (essay date 23 June 2003)
SOURCE: Kriegel, Leonard. “Wrestling with Augie March.” Nation 276, no. 24 (23 June 2003): 27-32.
[In the following essay, Kriegel offers a critical appreciation of The Adventures of Augie March, praising the character of Augie as well as Bellow's use of language throughout the novel.]
The struggle to force language to accept its own power is what molds the idea of becoming a writer that most of us have when young. There is a moment in time when that struggle is felt most profoundly and intimately. It may be the first conscious encounter with a literary “classic”; or it may be when the world is made recognizable by an author one never before heard of. For me, it was not reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or The Sound and the Fury that turned the world upside down, although my first encounters with Joyce and Faulkner had a most profound effect. It was...
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