Humboldt’s Gift

Humboldt’s Gift, novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1975. The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1976, is a self-described “comic book about death” whose title character is modeled on the self-destructive 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.