SOURCE: Amis, Martin. “A Chicago of a Novel.” Atlantic Monthly 276, no. 4 (October 1995): 114-27.

In the following essay, Amis labels The Adventures of Augie March as the “Great American Novel” and presents an overview of the characteristics that render the novel as a distinctly American work.

The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold forty-two years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do: it ended.

But what was that quest anyway—itself so essentially American? No literary masterpiece or federal epic is mentioned in the Constitution as one of the privileges and treats guaranteed to the populace, along with things like liberty and life and the right to bear computerized MAC-10s. Still, it is easy enough to imagine how such an aspiration might have developed. As its culture was evolving, and as cultural self-consciousness dawned, America...