The Adventures of Augie March

By Saul Bellow

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Saul Bellow's 1953 novel, a National Book Award winner, opens with "I am an American, Chicago born" and follows Augie March from his poor boyhood in Chicago during the Depression. Augie drifts from job to job and adventure to adventure, from petty crime to training an eagle in Mexico, always refusing to let anyone else, however well-meaning, decide who he should become.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”