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    A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"
    A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"
    A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"
    Ebook51 pages48 minutes

    A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535825177
    A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"

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      A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift" - Gale

      1

      Humboldt's Gift

      Saul Bellow

      1975

      Introduction

      Humboldt's Gift (1975), by Saul Bellow, is the eighth novel published by the celebrated and prolific Jewish-American author. Humboldt's Gift won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year. This novel takes place in Chicago, like many of Bellow's works, and is widely recognized as a roman à clef—a fictional story about real events—concerning Bellow's friend, Delmore Schwartz, a Jewish-American poet who lived and died in New York City. Humboldt's infamous life of brilliant success and crashing failure closely parallels that of Schwartz. His name appears to be a reference to Alexander von Humboldt, a famous nineteenth-century Prussian naturalist and explorer.

      Humboldt's Gift is less about Humboldt and more about the narrator, Charlie Citrine, who is a dear friend to Humboldt and strongly contrasts with the poet's personality. Charlie drifts through life, lost in his own thoughts, which are often philosophical and high-minded. He is an accidental success and now preyed upon by any who wish to use him or his money in the twilight of his literary career. Humboldt's Gift is a novel about transformation: bereft of his fortune, Charlie finally finds the strength of spirit—which Humboldt said he had—to stand up to his users and do exactly what he wants to with his life.

      Despite Faulkner's roots in the South, he readily condemns many aspects of its history and heritage in Absalom, Absalom!. He reveals the unsavory side of southern morals and ethics, including slavery. The novel explores the relationship between modern humanity and the past, examining how past events affect modern decisions and to what extent modern people are responsible for the past.

      Author Biography

      Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal), the youngest of four children. His original birth certificate was lost in a fire, but his birthday is generally recognized as June 10, 1915. His parents, Abraham and Liza, emigrated from Russia to Canada not long before Bellow was born. Just like Charlie in Humboldt's Gift, Bellow suffered from tuberculosis at age eight and stayed at a hospital for many months. In 1924, his family moved from their impoverished neighborhood in Quebec to a tenement in Chicago. Eight years later, at age seventeen, Bellow was devastated by the death of his mother, to whom he was close. He started college in 1933 at the University of Chicago, later transferring to Northwestern University. He graduated with honors in 1937 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and anthropology. Bellow started graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, but over Christmas vacation, he married Anita Goshkin and abandoned his studies. He really wanted to be a writer instead of an anthropologist. Bellow took a number of editorial and teaching jobs until the outbreak of World War II. He served in the Merchant Marine from 1944 to 1945 after being rejected by the Army due to a hernia.

      Bellow wrote his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), while he was waiting to be drafted into military service for World War II. His

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