SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher. “The Great American Augie.” Wilson Quarterly 25, no. 1 (winter 2001): 22-9.

In the following essay, Hitchens explores the enduring appeal of The Adventures of Augie March and deems the novel Bellow's “gold standard” of literature.

Augie March stands on the Chicago lakeshore at dawn on a New Year's Day in the 1930s:

I drank coffee and looked out into the brilliant first morning of the year. There was a Greek church in the next street of which the onion dome stood in the snow polished and purified blue, cross and crown together, the united powers of earth and heaven, snow in all the clefts, a snow like the sand of sugar. I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet sight, where the belly of...