My copy of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. There was something about this image on the front cover that felt very familiar. Very much like early American photography work I had seen before, a la Robert Frank. As it turns out, per the credits mentioned on the back cover, this photograph is by the now posthumously famous Vivian Maier.
This is quite some attention to detail by whoever was responsible for the cover design of this edition of the book published by Penguin in 2019. The reason I say this is because Ms. Maier primarily made photographs of street scenes in Chicago and New York where the greater part of the story of Humboldt's Gift takes place. The backdrop for a lot of Bellow's work is rooted in the idea of rapidly evolving American modernity in the mid twentieth as represented by Chicago.
The details captured in the image show us the curious import of Maier's photographic eye. The sharply dressed man in the foreground, hair carefully brushed back. His cigarette carelessly held between the lips at the corner of his mouth, the accumulated ash beginning to break away. The deeply pronounced crease lines across the forehead. The eyes staring into the distance. This moment of contemplation before a return to reality. Consider him Jewish, and he may well be the Charles Citrine of Bellow's imagination.
Humboldt's Gift was first published by Viking Press in 1975. Maier's work was not discovered till after her death in 2009.