Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winner
Humboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
Summary
A successful Chicago writer looks back on his volatile friendship with a brilliant, self-destructive poet modeled loosely on Delmore Schwartz, while juggling lawyers, ex-wives, a small-time gangster, and his own tangled finances. Bellow mixes high comedy with sustained meditation on art, money, mortality, and the place of the intellectual in postwar America. The novel is often read as a culminating statement of his philosophical, exuberantly verbal style.
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Historical Context & Significance
The win helped propel Bellow to the Nobel Prize in Literature later that same year; the character of Humboldt was based on Bellow's real-life friend, the poet Delmore Schwartz.