Charlie Citrine, successful writer, is haunted by the memory of his friend Von Humboldt Fleisher, a poet destroyed by madness and failure. Bellow drew on his relationship with Delmore Schwartz, and the novel is a comedy about America, about success, about what happens to poets in a culture that does not value poetry. The prose is Bellow at his most exuberant, sentences that think out loud, that argue with themselves. Humboldt's gift, when it finally arrives, is both ridiculous and redemptive. Bellow won the Nobel Prize the year after this was published. He had earned it long before.