Mr. Sammler's Planet

by Saul Bellow

Overview

Who is Mr. Sammler? A Jewish intellectual educated in Western philosophy, a one-eyed Holocaust survivor, the future author of the greatest biography ever written of H.G. Wells ... or merely the trusted confidant of countless eccentric New Yorkers, a "registrar of follies"? Through the chaotic streets of the Upper West Side old Artur Sammler paces, meditating on the human condition; attentive to everything and appalled by nothing; haunted by his past, present, and future. His world seems on the brink of apocalypse; both the recent moon landing and the death of his beloved benefactor have him furiously speculating on the end. With his inimitable tragicomic mastery Saul Bellow delves once again, and the reader with him, into a contemporary and chaotic universe in which the most profound reflections on the meaning of life mingle with the absurd, histrionic, endless minutiae of the every day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623730314
Publisher:	Odyssey Editions
Publication date:	11/13/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	268
Sales rank:	541,925
File size:	499 KB

About the Author

A fiction writer, essayist, playwright, lecturer, and memoirist, Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937 and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin before serving in the Marines during World War II. Later, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. Throughout his long and productive career, he contributed fiction to several magazines and quarterlies, including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Playboy, and Esquire, as well as criticism to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Leader, and others. Universally recognized as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, Bellow has won more honors than almost any other American writer. Among these, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt's Gift and the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish literature.” He was the first American to win the International Literary Prize, and remains the only novelist in history to have received three National Book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Saul Bellow died in 2005 at age 89.

Date of Birth:

June 10, 1915

Date of Death:

April 5, 2005

Place of Birth:

Lachine, Quebec, Canada

Place of Death:

Brookline, Massachusetts

Education:

University of Chicago, 1933-35; B.S., Northwestern University, 1937

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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)

Editorial Reviews

In this book, Bellow has succeeded in doing something he never quite managed before--or at least not quite so successfully. He has created a character who embodies his ideas, who serves, in fact, as his spokesman, yet remains convincing in his own right. Sammler is more than the sum of Bellow's parts. Where Augie March, Henderson and Herzog were brilliant, Sammler is brilliantly human.
— The New York Times, 1970

Anatole Broyard

The most important writer in the second half of the twentieth century...Bellow's oevre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary. -- Sunday Times of London

Bryan Appleyard

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Dazzling . . . [Bellow’s] entertaining and provocative howl of rage is a tour de force of disillusionment and disgust at the descent from high culture to barbarism.” —TheArticle

“The most important writer in English in the second half of the twentieth century . . . Bellow’s oeuvre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary.” —Sunday Times (London)

From the Publisher

It’s as much about the language in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel as it is about the philosophical, and what better narrator to handle Bellow’s complex characters, ideas, and luscious layering of words than AUDIOFILE Golden Voice George Guidall? Arthur Sammler is a Polish refugee—a Holocaust survivor with only one good eye. But that doesn’t keep him from seeing. Guidall portrays the septuagenarian Sammler as an observer of the human condition. He calls himself a “registrar of madness.” He worries about everything from human optimism to human suffering. He is “sorry for all and sore at heart.” Sammler’s encounter with a pickpocket, his anxiety about his daughter, his other familial concerns—Guidall recounts them all. But it’s Bellow’s language that resonates in his expert performance. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile