Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) reflects Bellow's turmoil about women with particular vengeance in his portrayal of the misogynous Mr. Sammler. A "Western Civ" literary aristocrat who spans exactly Bellow's own period of acculturation, Mr. Sammler is presented as a historic repository of a certain set of humanistic values Bellow greatly admires. Hence, he becomes a priestly or sacred object, survivor of both a symbolic and a literal holocaust, who now inhabits the much-diminished world of hippie-era New York. For the rest part he is a Swiftian misanthrope and a chronic misogynist. Mr Sammler, born the petted son of a Polish aristocrat, Sammler makes an anglophile of himself at an early age and receives his early intellectual acculturation in London in the era of H.G. Wells and the Bloomsbury intellectuals. Come the even of WW II he accompanies his wife to Europe to help her settle her father's estate when the two are cut off by the Nazi invasion. His wife dies, his daughter remains hidden by nuns, and Sammler escapes death by shooting, by crawling out from under a pile of Jewish bodies, shoots a soldier in the Zamosht Forest and spends the rest of the war hiding in a tomb. He and his daughter, reunited after the war, are subsequently brought to American and supported by an American relative, Elya Gruner. The setting for this novel is New York City and its era, the hippie and student movements of the 1960's. Despite Bellow's great empathy and love for Sammler, he is presented as a dysfunctional man whose entire acculturation and education, not to mention near death during the Holocaust, have rendered him less humanly qualified than he might hope to be. His moral task throughout this novel is to deal with his own misogny and misanthropy. Sammler, has put himself on ice, and must now allow his familial and humane feelings to return, just as me must accept the family which has accepted him, and the neurotic daughter he fears and rejects. 

On another level, the book is actually a rather focused psycho-sexual mapping of Western misogyny with Sammler as its quintessential example. The text provides elaborate accounts of the intellectual age he spans, a host of likely mentors, an account of his privileged, sexist, upper-class education, and numerous accounts of his pathological fear of women. Like an Old Testament prophet, Sammler equates the wicked sexual mores of the age with the collapse of civilization. He finally desires total immunity from women, preferring to read only his old mentors, the Bible and Meister Eckhardt. However, it is Elya Gruner, Sammler's kindly cousin and loving financial supporter, whose example and death finally drag Sammler from coldness to actual love. Spurning Dr. Lal's Faustian aspirations for colonizing the moon, Sammler opts for remaining on this doomed but human planet. He notes he would rather be a depth man and explore the ocean bottom in a bathysphere. His final prayer over Elya's dead body is among the most moving prose in the Bellow cannon: "Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner," he intones, while honoring Elya for his willingness to meet his human contract--"terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it--that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know." 

Mr. Sammler's Planet is a complex text that alienated many reviewers with its seeming harshness about the young, women, blacks, and the proletarian masses. Recent critical responses distinguish more clearly between Bellow and his characters by acknowledging the novel perhaps as Bellow's coming to terms with a certain kind of masculine modernist acculturation in a post-Kantian continental bourgeoisie constructed on patriarchal values. Many of Bellow's old concerns surface again: the attack on Faustian romanticism, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Spengler, Darwin, Burkhardt, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Lawrence. Then there is the general denunciation of a carnival world of turbulent people bereft of fixed values who are anarchistic, unmannerly, and corrupt. Particularly reprehensible to Bellow is the violent Eisen and the gorgeously-attired black pick-pocket who, in exposing himself to Sammler, represents a vulgar contemporary version of Rousseau's noble savage, or Lawrence's truly mystical and virile man. For these reasons it remains for most readers a stoic, pessimistic, somewhat sour book. Reviewers commented that Bellow was clearly tired and called it a crotchety old man's book, while others thought it was beautifully adapted to Bellow's middle-age.