Recommendations
Books Like Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow fiction, American Jewish intellectual novels, and books about civilization and decline
If Mr. Sammler's Planet impressed you with Sammler's mordant clarity about the 1960s and Bellow's ability to use a Holocaust survivor's consciousness as a lens on American civilization's discontents, these eight works share its intellectual seriousness, its comic intelligence, and its sense that the novel's job is to hold the culture up to the most demanding judgment.
- 1
Buy on AmazonHerzog
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's masterpiece — Moses Herzog writing unsent letters to everyone from Napoleon to Nietzsche while his marriage collapses; the fullest expression of Bellow's intellectual comedy and the consensus best Bellow to read.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's breakthrough novel — the picaresque Chicago Jewish boy in search of a worthwhile fate; the opposite pole of Sammler's settled judgment, all possibility and energy; the first great Bellow voice.
- 3
Buy on AmazonHumboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — Charlie Citrine haunted by the memory of the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher; the most autobiographically literary of his major novels and his most extended meditation on the relationship between art and American success.
- 4
Buy on AmazonPortnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
The other great comic novel of the American Jewish intellectual tradition from the same year (1969) — Roth's Alexander Portnoy is the neurotic version of Sammler's detachment; both novels use Jewish consciousness as a lens on American civilization.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Fixer
by Bernard Malamud
Malamud's Pulitzer-winning novel of a Jewish handyman in Kiev — where Sammler survives the Holocaust to judge American civilization, Yakov Bok survives blood libel persecution to discover what dignity requires; both center on Jewish consciousness under pressure.
- 6
Buy on AmazonCall It Sleep
by Henry Roth
The great predecessor novel of the American Jewish experience — David Schearl's consciousness in the Lower East Side tenements; Bellow's Sammler is the second generation's version of what Henry Roth's David's generation produced.
- 7
Buy on AmazonInvisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
The other great American novel of a consciousness displaced by society's categories — Ellison's unnamed narrator is invisible in America as Sammler is a ghost in it; both use their protagonists' marginality to see American civilization clearly.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Mandarins
by Simone de Beauvoir
De Beauvoir's great postwar French novel of the intellectual left's disillusionment — the Paris intelligentsia confronting what the war has revealed about politics and ethics; the French counterpart to Bellow's American intellectual seriousness.
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