Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift
Author(s)	Saul Bellow
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Viking
Publication date	1975
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	487 pp
ISBN	0670386553
OCLC Number	1339692
Dewey Decimal	813/.5/2
LC Classification	PZ3.B41937 Hu PS3503.E4488
Preceded by	Mr. Sammler's Planet
Followed by	The Dean's December

Humboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Saul Bellow, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year.

The novel, which Bellow initially intended to be a short story, is a roman à clef about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. It explores the changing relationship of art and power in a materialist America. This theme is addressed through the contrasting careers of two writers, Von Humboldt Fleisher (to some degree a version of Schwartz) and his protege Charlie Citrine (to some degree a version of Bellow himself). Fleisher yearns to lift American society up through art but dies a failure. In contrast, Charlie Citrine makes quite a lot of money through his writing, especially from a Broadway play and a movie about a character named Von Trenck - a character modeled after Humboldt.

Another notable character in the book is Rinaldo Cantabile, a wannabe Chicago gangster, who tries to bully Citrine into being friends and whose career advice to Citrine, focused solely on commercial interests, is the opposite of the advice Citrine was once given by his old mentor, Humboldt Fleisher, who valued artistic integrity above all other concerns.

Some critics, including Malcolm Bradbury, see the novel as a commentary on the increasing commodification of culture in mid-century America, and throughout much of the book, Bellow analyzes, through the voice of Citrine, his concerns about spirituality, poetry, and success in America.

References

Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen, 1982.