Humboldt's Gift

Saul Bellow. First edition, third printing (stated). New York: Viking Press, 1975. The dust jacket, in Good condition, is stained and worn but has done its job protecting the book itself. Hardcover in Bery Good condition. No writing or markings in the book, 487 pp. 

First edition of the author's 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning work. This is the author's eighth novel and the title was published just before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Saul Bellow was also nominated for the National Book Award.

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.