acknowledged and repaired. First-wave feminism includes nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminist activity leading up to extending the franchise to women, which occurred in Great Britain in 1918 and in the United States in 1920. Second-wave feminism lasted from approximately 1960 through 1989. Radical feminism took hold in Western nations in the 1970s. Radical feminists take an extreme viewpoint, which some criticize as being misandrist, or man-hating. In the 1970s, two significant milestones in the mainstream feminist movement were achieved. Passed in 1972, Title IX Education Acts forbade discrimination in education for women. In the 1973 case ofRoe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion. The Equal Rights Amendment was a big cause in the 1970s for many groups, including feminists, but despite its popularity, it failed to achieve ratification in 1982. Third-wave feminism began in the mid-1980s, alongside second-wave feminism, with a different theoretical approach. Third-wave feminists emphasize a close examination of gender and how gender is defined, among other applicable interpretations. The women in Bellow’s novel do not overtly represent ideals of feminism, but Denise and Renata, as single mothers, are less marginalized by society because of advances made by feminists. Renata’s flagrant sexuality is also more acceptable because of the social effects of some feminist thought.

Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, violent, and controversial clash between North and South Vietnam from 1945 to 1975. The United States was heavily involved in Vietnam’s struggles from 1965 through 1973 as part of U.S. participation in the cold war between communist and democratic nations. The United States allied with the anti-communist government of South Vietnam and joined forces with it to overcome communist (and U.S.S.R.-backed) North Vietnam. But this was a conflict unlike any the United States had ever fought because the Viet Cong (North Vietnam soldiers) engaged in guerilla warfare, a style of combat that relies on ambush and sabotage and is very difficult for opposing forces trained in traditional battlefield engagement to counter. South Vietnam and its allies sustained heavy casualties because they were unprepared for guerilla warfare. Back in the United States, people protested U.S. military action in South East Asia, and these demonstrations, which sometimes turned violent, led to accusations that protestors were unpatriotic, lazy, and self-indulgent. When U.S. forces pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, over seventy thousand American soldiers had died or were missing in the line of duty. Civilian casualties across South East Asia numbered more than ten million.

Realism in Literature
Post–World War II literature is marked by a trend toward realism in the United States. Bellow was a realist author although already established in his career and style by the 1970s. The turbulent politics of the 1960s influenced a development in the realism literary movement toward more experimental forms (such as blending fact and fiction or atypical narrative techniques) as well as content that focused on minority groups and their concerns. Significant experimental novels of the 1970s include Chimera (1972) by John Barth, Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1973), by Kathy Acker; Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon; and Breakfast of Champions (1973) by Kurt Vonnegut. Important African-American fiction and poetry from the 1970s include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), by Maya Angelou; Mumbo-Jumbo (1972), by Ishmael Reed; Roots (1976), by Alex Haley; and Song of Solomon (1977), by Toni Morrison. Minority literature became even more mainstream in the early 1980s.

Film Industry
In the United States, the New Hollywood period lasted from approximately 1967 until 1980. Young directors in the 1970s, such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese, made a huge impact on the American film industry, developing the current blockbuster movie model, which was the foundation of the film industry at the turn of the twenty-first century. Early blockbuster movies include Star Wars Episode IV and Jaws. Counterculture subjects and unusual techniques, often borrowed from foreign films, were also popular with young American audiences, giving rise to the independent film industry. Independent films are generally produced on a small budget and outside direct control of a major studio.

Point of ViewHumboldt’s Gift is told in first-person point of view, which means the reader sees the events of the novel through the eyes of one character who speaks in his own voice. Charlie spends a lot of time thinking about abstract concepts, which is weakly communicated in the first person. The benefit of first-person point of view is that the close proximity between reader and narrator makes the story more directly engaging. When Charlie is stood up by Renata in Madrid and left to care for her son, Roger, while she honeymoons with her new husband, the reader feels his heartbreak more keenly because of the immediacy between reader and narrator.

Foil Characters
Foil characters are delineated in part by the contrast they pose to one another. An author uses this literary device to highlight by contrast characteristics of the juxtaposed characters. This juxtaposition helps the reader to see something about the character via the contrast. In Humboldt’s Gift, the protagonist, Charlie, is contrasted with Humboldt; they are foil characters. In some ways their friendship is both unlikely and makes perfect sense because they are very different in their personalities, mannerisms, and, occasionally, tastes. Bellow shows that Charlie’s passive nature makes him an easy fit in many unlikely relationships, such as with his ex-wife Denise; his hoodlum shadow Cantabile; his fair-weather girlfriend Renata; and his irresponsible friend Thaxter. By the end of the novel, as the full extent of Humboldt’s character is revealed—his thoughtfulness and affection for those he truly loved—it is apparent that he was a true friend to Charlie.

The juxtaposition of the women in Charlie’s love life is particularly interesting. Naomi and Demmie were Charlie’s first loves and both were sweet young women. By contrast, Denise and Renata are concerned with status and money and ultimately ill-suited to Charlie. Just as the two halves of Charlie’s life are in stark contrast—happiness and fulfillment turned to discontent and frustration—so are the women from those periods in his life in contrast.

Conflict
Conflict is an aspect of the plot in which struggle occurs between two forces, such as character versus character or character versus nature. The end of the story often provides a resolution of conflict. A novel, because of its length and variety of characters, is often comprised of various kinds of conflict. In Humboldt’s Gift, the primary conflict is character versus society, in which Charlie struggles to free himself from the bonds of money, bad people, and material goods, all of which he is grown to despise. Wealth has not brought him any happiness and continues to drag him deeper into a meaningless existence. At the end of the novel, Charlie has given up his wealthy lifestyle to focus on the study of anthroposophy and to search for a solution to what ails society. Character versus character also recurs in this novel on a more minor level. Charlie struggles with Tomchek, Srole, Denise, Cantabile, Renata, Thaxter, and the Señora. On a more abstract level is the conflict between materialism and spirituality represented by Charlie’s efforts against the agents of materialism, such as Renata and Cantabile.

Bellow said that he put the best of himself into Humboldt's Gift. It does seem to combine the best features of his earlier fictions. It has the long, episodic plot, the huge cast of characters, and the humor of The Adventures of Augie March (1953). It also features the intellectual protagonist, the subjectivity, and the philosophical seriousness of Herzog (1964). The outer and inner worlds of Bellow are joined in a seamless whole.

Humboldt's Gift is also a roman a clef (a story based on real-life people and events). Various characters in the novel suggest actual people. Most important, Von Humboldt Fleisher seems to be based on Bellow's friend, the poet Delmore Schwartz who died in 1966. But as Bellow himself has suggested, the creative imagination does not work in terms of a one-to-one correspondence. His characters are more likely to be based on composites that his imagination further refines and synthesizes. Von Humboldt Fleisher is not simply Delmore Schwartz but also John Berryman and Hart Crane and, ultimately, the American Poet defeated by a hostile world. Too strict an identification limits the character's resonance.

• 1970s: Divorce rates are on the rise world-wide with approximately 50 percent of marriages in the United States ending in divorce by 1975.

  Today: Approximately 41 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce, a rate that has gradually been decreasing since the late 1970s. At the same time, marriage rates have also been declining.

• 1970s: Congress passes the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to give federal investigators and prosecutors the power to defuse organized criminal activity.

  Today: Identity theft, online extortion, and human trafficking are common transgressions for organized crime. Organized criminal activity that utilizes the Internet is difficult for the police to trace but advances in security technology are closing the gap in protection.

• 1970s: The cold war between communist and democratic world powers eases. Economic concerns and an arms race stalemate (acknowledged mutually assured destruction) drive the United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations to improve trade relations and thaw tensions.

  Today: Well over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war, regime change and economic hardship in former communist countries significantly redraw the map of Europe and Asia. China, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea remain under communist rule.

• 1970s: A decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), world nuclear powers, such as the Soviet Union and the United States, sign arms control agreements to limit arsenals and ban nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by one hundred and eighty-eight sovereign nations, is enacted in 1970.

  Today: The U.S. invasion of Iraq is justified by a concern that Iraq is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. As of 2007, the stockpile is not discovered. Meanwhile, Iran conducts nuclear research in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which some countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, object on the grounds that they believe the research is for weapons and not for power plants.

As Philip Toynbee has pointed out, Humboldt's Gift is probably America's nearest approach to those great Russian masterpieces, The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Dostoevsky. Like Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, Charlie Citrine is a comic hero, a holy fool, a soul-searching rascal. All three novels are a spiritual counterattack against the ultimate nullity of a secular society.

Humboldt’s Gift was adapted as an unabridged audio book in 1992 by Blackstone Audiobooks. It is read by Christopher Hurt. As of 2007, it was available on cassette or as an audio file download from online book retailers.

Sources
Bellow, Saul, Humboldt’s Gift, Penguin Books, 1996.

Broyard, Anatole, “Books of the Times: Lion or the Anthroposophist?” in New York Times, August 14, 1975, p. 29.

Gilman, Richard, “Saul Bellow’s New, Open, Spacious Novel about Art, Society, and a Bizarre Poet,” in New York Times, August 17, 1975, p. 209.

Leonard, John, “A Handsome Gift,” in New York Times, September 7, 1975, p. 268.

Nobel Foundation, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976,” in Nobelprize.org, 1976, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/index.html (accessed September 14, 2006).

Simpson, Louis, “The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz,” in New York Times, December 7, 1975, p. 308.

Further Reading
Atlas, James, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977. This biography covers Schwartz’s life and death, focusing on his writing career. Atlas’s fluid writing style makes this biography read like a novel.

Cronin, Gloria L., and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow, University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Cronin and Siegel have collected interviews with Bellow from 1953 through 1994. Some biographical information is included.

Phillips, Robert, ed., Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, Norton, 1993. This book collects correspondence between American poet Delmore Schwartz and his publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, from the time of Schwartz’s fame until mental illness incapacitated him. The two were good friends and shared a love of poetry.

Pifer, Ellen, Saul Bellow against the Grain, Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Pifer argues that Bellow was a radical writer. In this book, she examines ten of his novels within this new framework of assessment.

Steiner, Rudolph, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, translated by George Metaxa, Anthroposophic Press, 1947, http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/English/GA010_index.html (accessed October 11, 2006). Steiner’s major text on anthroposophy presents meditation exercises for the attainment of higher consciousness. It is available free on the Internet courtesy of the Rudolph Steiner Archive.