Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

Gloria Cronin (Brigham Young University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1969

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Satire

Resources

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) is set in 1960s New York City at the height of the student radical movements. It presents the slightly misogynistic Mr. Sammler – a classic old world “Western Civ” literary thinker and European aristocrat who exactly spans Bellow's own period of social and philosophical acculturation. Sammler, an elderly Holocaust survivor from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, was born the petted son of a Polish aristocrat. He has made an intellectual Anglophile of himself at an early age, later becoming part of the H.G. Wells and Bloomsbury intellectual groups, and on the eve of World War II accompanies his wife and daughter to Europe to help his wife settle her father's estate. He is cut off from his wife …

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645 words

Citation: Cronin, Gloria. "Mr. Sammler's Planet". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 November 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3451, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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