By Stuart Mitchner

Saul Bellow, who was born 100 years ago today in a suburb of Montreal, began his breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March in Paris in 1948 and finished it four years later in Princeton, in an office at Firestone Library.

Besides winning the National Book Award, Augie March has been named by Time and the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels in the English language. Writing in 1995, Martin Amis declares it “The Great American Novel” and Salman Rushdie seems to agree (“If there’s a candidate … this is it”). In the context of the GAM, Christopher Hitchens compares Augie March to The Great Gatsby, another perennial candidate, observing that its great advantage “lies in its scope and its optimism” as “the first time in American literature that an immigrant would act and think like a rightful Discoverer, or a pioneer.”

On those terms, Bellow’s personal history as an infant illegally smuggled over the border from Canada clearly qualifies him. He stakes his claim in one of the great American opening sentences, a legend in itself:

“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” more