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...