Mr. Sammler's Planet Reading Order

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) by Saul Bellow is the most formally concentrated of his major novels — a single day in the life of Arthur Sammler, a seventy-year-old Polish Jewish intellectual living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who survived the Holocaust (shot in the mass grave at Ponary and clawing his way out; killed a German soldier in the forest during the partisan period) and now watches the 1960s American city with the detached, mordant clarity of someone who has already seen civilization end. The novel's plot is minimal: Sammler witnesses a Black pickpocket operate on the M104 bus, is cornered by the pickpocket and shown his genitals as a warning, attends a lecture by an Indian scientist who believes the soul survives death, and manages the crisis of his niece Shula, who has stolen a manuscript about moon colonization. Bellow's real subject is the confrontation between Sammler's classical humanist values — formed in prewar London by H.G. Wells, whom Sammler knew personally — and the American 1960s, which Sammler views as a civilization in gleeful flight from the constraints that make civilization possible. The novel is also, unmistakably, a meditation on death: Sammler's nephew Elya Gruner lies dying in a hospital throughout the novel, and the novel ends at his deathbed. The novel's detractors have found its politics reactionary; its admirers have found it Bellow's most morally serious work — a concentration camp survivor's final judgments about the civilization he survived into.