SOURCE: Shaw, Patrick W. “History and the Picaresque Tradition in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.” CLIO 16, no. 3 (spring 1987): 203-19.

In the following essay, Shaw asserts that Bellow became the first American author to consciously choose the picaresque genre as a frame for his narrative with The Adventures of Augie March, asserting that Bellow also tailored the genre to address the milieu of postwar America.

The one distinguishing phenomenon of American prose fiction immediately after World War II was the rebirth of the picaresque, a genre which had lain fallow since Mark Twain helped define the type with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and which dominated the American novel throughout the 1950s and 1960s. While Saul Bellow was not the first to reintroduce the picaresque, having been preceded by J. D. Salinger with Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Ralph Ellison with Invisible Man (1952), he was the first...