Humboldt's giftbySaul Bellow

Humbold's Gift (1975) is a novel by 1976 Nobel Lareate Saul Bellow. It won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It explores the changing relationship of art and power in a materialist America.

In the novel, which was originally intended to be a short story, Bellow revisits his relationship with the writer Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), whose fictitious counterpart, a visionary poet named Von Humboldt Fleischer, suffers the same neglect and premature death. Bellow's surrogate is a writer named Charlie Citrine.  Both embody the fate of artists destroyed by America's materialistic culture--until Charlie is saved by the success of a comedy about cannibalism that the two friends had written years before Humboldt's death, resulting in the title of the book.

The book is an example of Roman à clef.

---

Product Description
For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.