Humboldt’s Gift (Magill Book Reviews)
At a glance:
- Author: Saul Bellow
- First Published: 1975
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: 1970’s, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Authors or writers, New York City, Poetry or poets, Paris, Chicago, West, U.S., Kidnapping, Films, movies, or motion pictures, Eccentrics or eccentricities, Texas, Debtors or creditors, Madrid
- Locales: New York, NY, Paris, France, Chicago, IL, Madrid, Spain, Houston, TX, Corpus Christi, TX
The narrator, Charlie Citrine, is a somewhat diminished version of Bellow, a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose career and reputation have flourished during the same years that Humboldt’s have declined. Even after death, the outrageous, eccentric figure of Humboldt looms large in Charlie’s life, never far out of sight as Charlie grapples with a late-midlife crisis populated by agents, lawyers, accountants, gangsters, lovely ladies, and former wives (his own and Humboldt’s).
Set mainly in Chicago in the early 1970’s, with frequent flashbacks to an earlier New York, the...
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