Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow [THE FRANKLIN LIBRARY / 1983]

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow with illustrations by Barry Shapiro 

LEATHER BOUND COLLECTOR'S EDITION [1983] THE FRANKLIN LIBRARY

Green leather binds this gorgeous hardcover edition, which features 22 kt gold gilt cover and edges, raised bands, sewn in silk bookmark and marbled end papers. 

Book is in excellent condition; like new with minor wear. 

The novel, for which Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976, is a self-described "comic book about death," whose title character is modeled on the self-destructive lyric poet Delmore Schwartz. Charlie Citrine, an intellectual, middle-aged author of award-winning biographies and plays, contemplates two significant figures and philosophies in his life: Von Humboldt Fleisher, a dead poet who had been his mentor, and Rinaldo Cantabile, a very-much-alive minor mafioso who has been the bane of Humboldt's existence. Humboldt had taught Charlie that art is powerful and that one should be true to one's own creative spirit. Rinaldo, Charlie's self-appointed financial adviser, has always urged Charlie to use his art to turn a profit. At the novel's end, Charlie has managed to set his own course.