For many years, Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charles Citrine were the best of friends-Humboldt a grand erratic figure; Charlie a young man of frenzied and noble longings. But by the 1970s, Humboldt has died a failure in New York and Charlie's success-ridden life in Chicago has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life-he leaves Charlie a bequest in his will.

Now, Charlie is middle-aged and a bit shaky and it is high time that his life came to something. His days are cluttered with comic absurdities and his destiny seems obscured. Himself a thinker, he longs to come from left field and knock them all dead, to make intellectuals as clearly superfluous as they seem to him to be. But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in law suits; he is held in thrall by the young, sexually-beguiling but expensive and unsuitable Renata; he has fallen into the hands of a neurotic Mafioso named Rinaldo Cantabile; and his career seems to have ground to a halt.

How the gentle but resilient Charlie comes to know what he must do and how he triumphs over his ever more ridiculous tribulations is the great discovery of Humboldt's Gift.

AudioFile...

“This production is exceedingly well-narrated by Christopher Hurt, whose narrator's voice conveys the various moods of the main character, Charles Citrine, an aging Lothario, battling the aging process and his writer's block.”

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), author of eleven novels and numerous novellas and stories, was the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards. He also received the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Book Award Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Bellow was also the author of several plays, short stories, and critical essays. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, he served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He taught at New York University, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota, and served as chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.