Humboldt's Gift

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [iv], 487, [3 (blank)]. Black cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. Excerpts originally published in Playboy Magazine and Esquire.

Foxed and dusty to top and fore-edges, spine ends pushed in, boards bruised in a couple of places to top edges. Dustjacket sunned and soiled to front and spine, 1-inch long tear to upper back spine fold [now glued together internally with adhesive], smaller closed tears and rubbing to corners and edges.

Author's eighth novel. Winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A National Book Award nominee and a Burgess 99 title. Initially intended as a short story, this self-described "comic book about death," is a roman à clef about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz and in a wider sense, an exploration of the conflict between art and power in an increasingly commercialized America. "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