Mr. Sammler's Planet

Summary

Artur Sammler, a one-eyed Holocaust survivor and former London intellectual now living in late-1960s Manhattan, walks the city observing the sexual revolution, campus radicalism, and the approaching moon landing with weary, sometimes appalled detachment. Bellow uses Sammler's interior monologue to stage a sustained argument about civilization, memory, and what humans owe one another. The novel is among his most uncompromising and divisive books.