By the time Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, he had already populated American letters with a menagerie of characters you couldn’t help but root for.
Fifty years ago, he gave us Augie March, a well-meaning, wandering “Columbus” who goes nowhere and everywhere in the course of six hundred bursting pages. There is Moses Herzog, embattled, embittered and twice-divorced, but hopeful, always hopeful. Even Bellow’s supporting cast leaves an impression. A would-be prize fighter has “an immense face like raked garden soil in need of water.” An institutionalized brother’s look reveals “wisdom kept prisoner by incapacity.” There are those who call Bellow “the greatest living American author.” Two of them, Martin Amis and James Wood, explain why.
Thursday, October 16th, at 6:00 pm at the Boston Public Library, join Martin Amis, James Wood, Stanley Crouch and Jonathan Wilson in a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Adventures of Augie March. The reception is open to the public.
Guests:
Martin Amis, author, most recently, of “Yellow Dog”
James Wood, editor, The Library of America Collection, “Saul Bellow, Novels: 1944-1953″ and literary critic, The New Republic.