Saul Bellow's 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March is perhaps, of all the great American novels we've discussed, the one whose cultural imprint has faded the most. Even among Bellow fans this freewheeling exploration of American identity tends to take a backseat to subsequent classics such as Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975). Yet for readers who recognize the Whitmanesque strain within Bellow's insistently intellectual worldview, Augie March offers a garrulous, propulsive portrait of the representative American as a picaro, the rogue hero who lives by his wits. In this epic novel in which the journey itself is the destination, Bellow synthesizes a host of influences (Cervantes, Henry Fielding, Twain, Dickens) to celebrate the sheer gusto of American exuberance and the foundational belief that the self is one's clay to mold without rules to follow. If as one original reviewer declared, Augie March is a rolling stone (a decade before that term became synonymous with rock 'n' roll), this rambling, swaggering embodiment of restless American energy is more Muddy Waters than Bob Dylan: perfectly happy to keep on keepin' on, Augie March doesn't need "no direction home."
Episode 28: Falling off the Cliff with The Catcher in the Rye
Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING
Episode 19: Riding the Rocket with Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES
Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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