Recommendations
Books Like Henderson the Rain King
Best books to read after Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King is his most exuberant novel — Gene Henderson, a roaring American millionaire, going to Africa and becoming the Rain King. These recommendations extend the experience through Bellow's other major novels and through the tradition of the picaresque American quest novel.
- 1Buy
Herzog
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's companion confessional novel — Moses Herzog writing unsent letters to everyone who has wronged him; less exuberant than Henderson but more moving, and often ranked as Bellow's finest achievement.
- 2Buy
Humboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's Pulitzer-winning novel — a Chicago writer reckoning with the legacy of his brilliant, destroyed friend; the most clearly autobiographical Bellow and the most directly concerned with the fate of the artist in America.
- 3Buy
Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's most Whitmanesque novel — a Jewish boy from Chicago making his way through the twentieth century with exuberant energy; shares Henderson's picaresque form and high-velocity prose.
- 4Buy
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
The American picaresque road novel — Sal and Dean driving across America in search of something they can't quite name; the same energy as Henderson, the same conviction that movement might reveal meaning.
- 5Buy
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Ignatius J. Reilly on the streets of New Orleans — another enormous, outraged, philosophical American figure who believes the world has failed to properly appreciate him; the most comic parallel to Henderson's raging self-examination.
- 6Buy
The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Listed again for emphasis — if you read Henderson and want more Bellow, Augie March is the companion text: the same Chicago-Jewish world, the same picaresque form, the same belief that a great man can be known by the extravagance of his desires.
- 7Buy
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's novel about a middle-aged man in crisis — the European philosophical equivalent of Henderson's quest, organized around the same question: what does life want from a man who has outlived his certainties?
- 8Buy
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
The other great American novel of 1952 (Henderson was 1959) — an unnamed Black man moving through a society organized to render him invisible, with the same wild comic energy and moral urgency as Henderson.
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