Humboldt’s Gift.

"It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people": First Edition of the the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Novel; Signed by Saul Bellow

Humboldt’s Gift.

BELLOW, Saul.

Item Number: 33024

New York: The Viking Press, 1975.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by Saul Bellow. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light toning.

Humboldt's Gift is a self-described "comic book about death," whose title character is modeled on the lyric poet Delmore Schwartz. Charlie Citrine, an intellectual, middle-aged author of award-winning biographies and plays, contemplates two significant figures and philosophies in his life: Von Humboldt Fleisher, a dead poet who had been his mentor, and Rinaldo Cantabile, a very-much-alive minor mafioso who has been the bane of Humboldt's existence. Humboldt had taught Charlie that art is powerful and that one should be true to one's creative spirit. Rinaldo, Charlie's self-appointed financial adviser, has always urged Charlie to use his art to turn a profit. At the novel's end, Charlie has managed to set his own course.

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