Saul Bellow (1915–2005) was a Canadian-born American novelist raised in Chicago by Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. His novels, including The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet, combine street-smart comedy with philosophical seriousness. He won three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift (1976) and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
