''Mr. Sammler's Planet'' is a 1970
novel
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...
by the
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
author
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only wr ...
. It won the
National Book Award for Fiction
The National Book Award for Fiction is one of five annual National Book Awards, which recognize outstanding literary work by United States citizens. Since 1987 the awards have been administered and presented by the National Book Foundation, but ...
in 1971.
["National Book Awards – 1971"]
NBF. Retrieved 2012-03-03. (With essay by Craig Morgan Teicher from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
Plot synopsis
Mr. Artur Sammler,
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
in 1960s
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering.
To Mr. Sammler—who by the end of the novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings—a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him". To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live.
Literary significance and criticism
Though some critics have pigeonholed the novel as a response to the Holocaust or as a Jeremiad against 1960s social mores — and it is true that Sammler is horrified by those mores because, as
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
pointed out, he views them as "the betrayal by the crazy species of the civilized ideal" — others have noted that the novel revolves, as does
''Herzog'', around Sammler's conflicts between intellect and intuition, between acting in the world and standing aside to observe it. In a slowly building epiphany at the novel's end, Sammler finds a balance;
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels '' Bla ...
wrote that she admired "the conclusion of ''Mr. Sammler's Planet'', which is so powerful that it forces us to immediately reread the entire novel, because we have been ''altered in the process of reading it'' and are now, at its conclusion, ready to begin reading it."
At the conclusion, Sammler speaks to God. Referring either to the existence of objective moral truths or to the existence of God Himself, he says: "For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know." In a lecture a few years later, asked to explain those lines, Bellow said this: "You read the New Testament and the assumption Jesus makes continually is that people know the difference immediately between good and evil... And that is in part what faith means. It doesn't even require discussion. It means that there is an implicit knowledge — very ancient if not eternal — which human beings really share and that if they based their relationships on that knowledge existence could be transformed."
[as quoted i]
Pifer, ''op.cit.'', p.7
/ref>
References
External links
at the Nobel Prize website
Saul Bellow Society
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mister Sammler's Planet
1970 American novels
Novels by Saul Bellow
Novels set in New York City
Works originally published in The Atlantic (magazine)
National Book Award for Fiction winning works
Viking Press books