Humboldt's Gift

Review Novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1975. The novel, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature 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. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature About the Author Saul Bellow (19152005) wrote thirteen novels and numerous novellas and stories in his lifetime. In 1975 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldts Gift , and in 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Jeffrey Eugenides is the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides . Charlie Citrine, suffering from steadily worsening troubles with women, career, and life in general, receives unexpected aid and comfort in the form of a belated bequest from his onetime friend and mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit.