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Bellagio; August on Nantucket. Mr. Sammler’s Planet published in back-to-back issues of Atlantic Monthly .
     
    1970 S. Y. Agnon dies. Mr. Sammler’s Planet published in book form. Bellow visits Nairobi and Addis Ababa. At Purdue University, delivers “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs,” assault on fashionable avant-gardism of, among other publications, Partisan Review under editorship of William Phillips and Richard Poirier. Receives honorary doctorate from New York University. June at Jerusalem artists’ colony Mishkenot Sha’ananim.
    1971 “Culture Now” printed in Modern Occasions, quarterly magazine edited by Philip Rahv. Bellow wins National Book Award for Mr. Sammler’s Planet . Off-Broadway revival of The Last Analysis at Circle in the Square; reviews more favorable; closes after five weeks.
     
    1972 John Berryman leaps to his death from Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. (“Faith against despair, love versus nihilism, had been the themes of his struggles and his poems. What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit. He drew it out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more.”) Harvard and Yale award Bellow honorary degrees. Edmund Wilson dies in June. Bellow travels to Japan. Nicola Chiaromonte dies. Henry Volkening dies; Bellow engages Harriet Wasserman, Volkening’s protégée, as new literary agent. Death of Harvey Swados. In November, delivers “Literature in the Age of Technology” at Smithsonian Institution.
     
    1973 Attends meetings of the Chicago Anthroposophical Society. In April, begins six-week residency in Rodmell, East Sussex, at country house of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Through Mircea and Christinel Eliade, meets Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, Romanian-born professor of mathematics at Northwestern. At Viking, Elisabeth Niebuhr Sifton now Bellow’s editor. In December, Philip Rahv dies.
     
    1974 “Humboldt’s Gift,” excerpt from novel in progress of the same name, appears in Playboy . Growing enthusiasm for Anthroposophy and writings of founder Rudolf Steiner. (“I do admit to being intrigued with Steiner. I do not know enough to call myself a Steinerian. The college professor in me wants to administer a quick quiz to those who knock him, to see whether they have done their homework.”) In November, marries Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. “Burdens of a Lone Survivor,” a second excerpt from Humboldt’s Gift, in Esquire .
     
    1975 Attends White House dinner in honor of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Travels to England to speak with Owen Barfield, barrister-philosopher and devoted Steinerian, whose book Saving the Appearances is source of Bellow’s Anthroposophical interests. Humboldt’s Gift published in August. In October, begins three-month stay in Israel to collect material for work of nonfiction; interviews A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Abba Eban, Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Alexandra lectures on probability theory at Hebrew University. In November Lionel Trilling dies; in December, Hannah Arendt.
    1976 Wins Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift . Nonfiction work To Jerusalem and Back appears in back-to-back issues of The New Yorker ; published as book in October. In December, Bellow awarded Nobel Prize “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” At Stockholm, sounds familiar theme of previous addresses: “We must not permit intellectuals to become our bosses. And we do them no good by allowing them to run the arts. Should they, when they read novels, find in them only the endorsement of their own opinions? Are we here to play such games?”
     
    1977 First District Court of Chicago nullifies property settlement in 1968 divorce from Susan, ruling that Bellow had underestimated current and future royalties, and orders him to pay increased alimony and child support. In March, delivers Jefferson Lectures in