Humboldt's Gift
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| Humboldt's Gift | |
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| Author | Saul Bellow |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Viking |
| Publication date | 1975 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 487 pp |
| ISBN | 0670386553 |
| Preceded by | 'Herzog' |
| 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 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). Von Humboldt 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. Citrine is in many ways compromised: by knowingly submitting to exploitation by a host of scheming characters, by passivity and detachment, by dreamy discursions into anthroposophy.
Some critics, including Malcolm Bradbury, see the novel as a commentary on the increasing commodification of culture in mid-century America.
| Awards | ||
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| Preceded by The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara |
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1976 |
Succeeded by 1977:no award given 1978:Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson |
[edit] References
Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen, 1982.
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