Humboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
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In Saul Bellow's tragicomic HUMBOLDT'S GIFT (1975), the main character, Charlie Citrine, is a successful writer who is tortured by a feeling of emptiness and by his troubling memories. Through his friend (and sometime mentor), the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer, Citrine learns the importance of the spiritual; and, through the unlikely figure of a gangster named Cantabile, Charlie is reawakened to his responsibilities. The question he grapples with is "how to be a man" in the materialist and antihuman society in which he lives--and then how to find the courage to deal with the answer to that question. The character of Humboldt is heavily based on Delmore Schwartz, who was Bellow's friend. HUMBOLDT'S GIFT was one of Bellow's most successful books, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Editions of Humboldt's Gift
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ISBN |
Binding/Format MP3 |
Publisher Blackstone Audio Inc |
Date 2008 |
Price $37.07 |
 NEW |
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ISBN |
Binding/Format Book |
Publisher Secker and Warburg |
Date 1975 |
Price £1.99 |
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ISBN |
Binding/Format Compact Disc |
Publisher Blackstone Audio Inc |
Date 2008 |
Price $96.74 |
NEW |
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ISBN |
Binding/Format Paperback |
Publisher Penguin USA |
Date |
Price $1.00 |
Used, Good |
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ISBN |
Binding/Format Hardcover |
Publisher Penguin Group USA |
Date 1979 |
Price $1.00 |
Used - Acceptable |
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Audio Cassette |
Publisher Blackstone Audio Inc |
Date 1997 |
Price $81.65 |
New |
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Paperback |
Publisher Penguin Classics |
Date 2008 |
Price $10.01 |
NEW |
Media Reviews
"What Bellow is trying to do with the novel form is, of course, immensely ambitious and very difficult. In HERZOG, he brought it off by the letter device and the fine madness of the hero. Charlie Citrine is an interesting study in the competing urges of the flesh and the spirit, money-making and truth-seeking, but he is over-indulged by his creator. The novel would have been vastly improved by ruthless cutting; as it stands it is chiefly memorable for its many comic moments, superb descriptive snapshots of Chicago and brilliant mimicry of lawyers, businessmen and crooks. And that, it must be said, is a lot to be grateful for."
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