SOURCE: Rolo, Charles J. “A Rolling Stone.” Atlantic Monthly 192, no. 4 (October 1953): 86-7.

In the following review, Rolo argues that The Adventures of Augie March presents the “archetypal” story of “the American as a rolling stone” but notes that the novel's protagonist lacks emotional depth.

Saul Bellow, who is now publishing his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, has taken a fruitful hint from Cervantes's great parody of a classic Spanish type. His hero-narrator—in whom there is a “laughing creature” forever rising up—unfolds to us a slightly kidding but essentially serious version of an archetypal American saga: the saga of the American as a rolling stone, an irrepressible explorer who doesn't quite know who he is and is always trying “to become what I am”; who keeps seeking the fullest experience of life. The self-educated Augie tells his story in a freshly personal style which intermixes...