Inside Llewyn Davis Echoes Humboldt's Gift

 

The Coen brothers have made a film about a folk singer Llewyn Davis, based on Dave Van Ronk's posthumous memoir "The Mayor of Macdougal Street" (2005).  He is but a footnote in the history of American popular music (NYT, 12/8/13).

 

Dylan, Rotolo, Van Ronk in 1963

 Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift (1975) contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature.  The character Von Humboldt Fleisher is based on the life of Delmore Schwartz, a Jewish-American poet who lived and died in Brooklyn.  Humboldt published an avant-garde poetry book in the 1930s, he dies of a heart attack in the 1960s. 

  

 

When viewing Inside Llewyn Davis I could not help notice the parallels with Humboldt's Gift.  Both Van Ronk and Schwartz were second rate artists surviving in an era that would end in an explosion of post-1950s talent, notably Bob Dylan and the British wave in music and authors like Mailer, Bellow, Roth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon in literature.