Mr. Sammler's Planet

Summary

Artur Sammler, a one eyed Holocaust survivor and former London intellectual now living in late 1960s Manhattan, walks the city observing the sexual revolution, campus radicalism, and the approaching moon landing with weary, sometimes appalled detachment. Bellow uses Sammler's interior monologue to stage a sustained argument about civilization, memory, and what humans owe one another. The novel is among his most uncompromising and divisive books.