Mr Sammler's prescience
What Saul Bellow's masterpiece tells us about today
In 1970 the novelist Saul Bellow, a titan of American letters, published his masterpiece Mr Sammler’s Planet.
Its eponymous hero is a Holocaust survivor who, in a decaying New York City, sees into the heart of things. A calculated attack on a range of liberal pieties, the novel caused intense controversy. Sammler, and thus Bellow himself, was…
