Mr Sammler's Planet (Penguin Classics)

Bellow, Saul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142437832 ISBN 13: 9780142437834

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2004

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler-who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings-a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him." To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.

Review:

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Winner of the National Book Award in Fiction

"The most important writer in English in the second half of the twentieth century...Bellow's oeuvre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary." -Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times (London)

About the Author:

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, with honors in sociology and anthropology, and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. During the Second World War he served in the Merchant Marines. His titles include The Adventures of Augie March, which won the American National Book Award for fiction in 1954, Humboldt's Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize and, most recently, Collected Stories (2001).

Stanley Crouch's books include Notes of a Hanging Judge, The All-American Skin Game (Nominated for the American National Book Award), and a novel, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award.