Humboldt's Gift (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
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
Humboldt's Gift is a kind of gothic novel in the sense that its protagonist is haunted by a ghost. The ghost is both a living man and the spirit or ideals that the man, an older writer named Von Humboldt Fleisher, represents.
Humboldt is a writer whose talent—or genius—has been corrupted by the American vision of success. The protagonist is modeled closely on Bellow's recollections of a friend, poet Delmore Schwartz, who in the late 1930's produced a first book of poetry that was hailed as a work of promising genius but who died with the promise unfulfilled. Humboldt...
[The entire page is 874 words long]
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