Mr. Sammler's Planet

By Saul Bellow

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Bellow's 1970 novel, which earned him a third National Book Award, centers on Artur Sammler, an elderly Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and now lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the late 1960s. Half-blind and thoughtful, he watches a city and a society that seem to be coming apart, while a pickpocket, a stolen manuscript and a dying nephew draw him into events.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”