“I am an American, Chicago born,” begins Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; somethings an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Though he was born in Montreal, it was “that somber city” on Lake Michigan where Bellow acquired his American voice, in ample evidence through the propulsive swagger of his most celebrated novel’s first sentence.

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Bellow has long had a reputation for being conservative, stodgy, and tweedy, which is not undeserved. But in The Adventures of Augie March (long appreciated more in Europe than the country where it was written) there is a distinctive style of voice simultaneously tough and tender, a focalized first person narration that, with its combination of Biblical parallelism and wryness, is distinctly of the United States’ eternal second city.

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Every American writer, if that adjective is to mean anything, must in their prose or poetry pen their own Declaration of Independence, almost as if it’s something in the collective unconscious, some seething and hidden mind that animates the national genius. As brilliant as The Adventures of Augie March, a picaresque novel about its titular protagonist as he perambulates through the Chicago of the Great Depression, its voice is not sui generis. Instead, its genesis comes from “Song of Myself,” where the poet provides self-encomium to “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” That was the Big Bang in poetry for American first-person narration, and the influence of Whitman on Bellow is obvious. It’s a declaration not just of independence, but of existence.

Every American writer, if that adjective is to mean anything, must in their prose or poetry pen their own Declaration of Independence, almost as if it’s something in the collective unconscious.

It is telling that Whitman begins with a statement of identity, then moves into the national allegiance (defined through his roughness), which is then conflated with the universe. At its worst, American individualism (with its myths of boot-strapping and entrepreneurial can-do) is just the propaganda of commercialism, a supply-side fable. Whitman, however, moves the locus of that individualism from the merely economic, or even the political, into something metaphysical. This is the disembodied consciousness gaining sentience, willing its own life into being, and realizing that nothing is actually disembodied, thus learning to lean and loaf and invite the soul. A reviewer at the London-based From the Critic mocked Whitman as an “amiable savage,” likening him to Caliban and describing Leaves of Grass as being written by someone who “relies on his own rugged nature; and trust to his own rugged language,” an element which “carries in its bosom the seeds of decay.” The reviewer was an idiot, of course, as the great, gray poet introduced the very opposite.

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It only took a few decades for Whitman’s American first-person narration to be translated into prose, and in that manifestation it’s just as simultaneously declaratory and languid, self-assured and natural: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sayer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” Here was a novel—finally—that was unequivocally American. Not Puritan-haunted like the great writers of New England, or even the cosmopolitan eccentricities of a Melville, but fully and totally spoken in a new voice that was of the broad, mid-section of the continent.

Twain’s 1885 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which Bellow so shamelessly and gloriously cribbed his title from) wasn’t the first great American novel, but it was the first great novel that was so unabashedly American. The voice of Huck Finn, that wayward orphan of the Mississippi, is drawn from the syntax and diction of the poor and the enslaved; it sprouts from the fertile earth of Twain’s own Missouri. Imagine how Twain, that self-invented riverboat sailor, former Confederate soldier turned advocate for racial reconciliation, must have sounded to readers familiar with the dark, drawing-room prose of a Henry James, that stuffed New York Englishman? What Whitman did with poetry, Twain did with prose. The voice of Huck Finn echoes through subsequent American novels; it’s the language of that vibrant first-person narration. (There is a reason why Hemingway said that every American novelist writes in the shadow of Twain.)

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“She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise,” writes Philip Roth in the opening sentence of 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Often categorized along with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as exponents of a particularly Jewish-American sensibility, all three were additionally masters of the American voice. In Roth’s example, we see the obvious differences from a Twain or a Whitman, the evocation of a shtetl humor, the (to be revealed) psychoanalytic themes. But that Alex Portnoy, for all his differences, is a child of Huck Finn, shouldn’t be doubted. It’s the same self-affirmation, the same self-consciousness, whether from the Scots-Irish Twain or the Jewish Roth.

Post-war American literature is often identified as a time of “identity writing,” when ethnic minorities gave expression to their own stories that were too often occluded in the national imagination. This is accurate, but incomplete, for it also involved the full assimilation of that American first-person narration as well, as evidenced by that son of Twain named Roth. Because the first sentence of a novel is so crucial (the most important sentence in fact), it’s where the full effect of this voice is most apparent.

“If you really want to hear about it,” begins Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s 1951 classic of teen angst, The Catcher in the Rye, “the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Caulfield has the same rambling syntax (which despite its baroqueness is also understated), the same humor and profanity, the same dismissal of “literature” and his antecedents, as Huck Finn. Stick that red cap on the latter, put him in the mid-century Upper West Side rather than Antebellum Missouri, infuse him with some spending money, and they’re practically the same person.

You hear the same voice in Jewish-American Michael Chabon’s 1988 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (“At the beginning of summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business”); Greek-American Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 Middlesex (“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974”); the Native American Sherman Alexie’s 2007 Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (“I was born with water on the brain”); and Dominican-American Junot Diaz’s 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (“This is how it all starts: with your mother calling you into the bathroom”).

All of these novels are launched by the unabashed declarative of the eternal “I,” of the first person’s power to remake the world anew. Even when that voice is uttered by the unseen narrator, it serves to make a declaration of identity. “I am an invisible man,” says the anonymous narrator in the Black novelist Ralph Ellison’s 1953 Invisible Man, “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.” The same rhythm and syntactical prosody, the same humor and understatement, the same freeing dismissal of that which has come before.

What all of these authors share, from Twain to Plath, Bellow to Morrison, whether they speak ironically or angrily, hopefully or assertively, is that sense of cool which is so inexplicably American.

For sure, there is something about this swagger that’s coded as masculine, but that doesn’t mean that it must be written by a male novelist (quite the opposite), for among the most arresting voices in American first-person narration—and ones that often wryly subvert—were penned by women. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” says Esther Greenwood, the main character in poet Sylvia Plath’s 1963 classic about mental deterioration, The Bell Jar. A sentence equal parts jaded and menacing, evoking that steaming metropolis of open fire hydrants and jangling box fans in the most torrid months, all overlaid with the specter of treason and capital punishment, focalized through a young woman about to be institutionalized.

“Don’t be afraid,” says the young enslaved woman Florens in Toni Morrison’s 2008 A Mercy, “My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark—weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more—but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare my teeth.” A better explicator of the nineteenth-century’s structures of feeling than anyone who actually lived in the nineteenth-century, Morrison appropriates those old forms from the gothic to the epistolary (both in the case of A Mercy), crafting a voice that is unmistakably of the American variety. As with Plath’s, there is the same self-affirmation, the same occlusions and subversions and wordplay.

What all of these authors share, from Twain to Plath, Bellow to Morrison, whether they speak ironically or angrily, hopefully or assertively, is that sense of cool which is so inexplicably American. A diction from the shadows, a syntax best spoken in the in-between places. What the French so helpfully called noir. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills,” says the hard-boiled PI in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 The Big Sleep. “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.” America always toggles between those extremes, sometimes shaved and sober, sometimes disheveled and drunk, with the voice always capable of encompassing both extremes. A grammar for those laying in the gutter but capable of seeing the whole goddamn kosmos.  

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From American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America by Ed Simon. Copyright © 2026. Available from IG Publishing.