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Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift

About the Book

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

“I think it A Work of genius, I think it The Work of a Genius, I think it brilliant, splendid, etc. If there is literature (and this proves there is) this is where it’s at.” –John Cheever

A Penguin Classic

Saul Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Dleisher. At the time of Humboldt’s death, Charlie’s life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and he’s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic Mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.

This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Praise for Humboldt's Gift

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Though Bellow grew up in Chicago, his portrayals of New York are masterful. . . . Humboldt’s Gift [is a] barbed portrait of dreamers and artists and lives made between commerce and culture; years before I had a play on Broadway, Bellow’s novel conveyed the visceral texture of the experience in ways that turned out to be exactly right.” —Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, in The New York Times

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About the Author

Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was born of Russian Jewish parents in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He received his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937. His novel The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. His further awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift (1975); the International Literary Prize for Herzog, for which he became the first American recipient; and the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by France to non-citizens. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. More by Saul Bellow
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About the Author

Jeffrey Eugenides
JEFFREY EUGENIDES is the son of an American-born father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. The Virgin Suicides was first published in 1993 to rapturous acclaim and it has been translated into fifteen languages and made into a feature film. Middlesex, his second novel, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Jeffrey Eugenides's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review and Granta. Eugenides lives in Princeton, New Jersey. More by Jeffrey Eugenides
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