Reading Order
Henderson the Rain King Reading Order
Henderson the Rain King (1959) by Saul Bellow is the most exuberant of Bellow's novels — a picaresque account of Gene Henderson, a huge, loud, unsatisfied American millionaire in his mid-fifties who goes to Africa on an impulse, becomes involved in two African tribes (the Arnewi and the Wariri), and finds himself accidentally appointed Rain King. Henderson talks constantly, roars with anxiety and desire, and cannot stop asking the question that drives him: 'What does life want of me?' The novel is at once a comic novel, a bildungsroman, a philosophical quest, and a meditation on American energy and excess. Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
Where to start
Henderson the Rain King (1959)
Complete Henderson the Rain King Book List
- 1Buy
Henderson the Rain King
Saul Bellow·1959 - 2Buy
Herzog
Saul Bellow·1964·Bellow's other confessional tragicomedy — Moses Herzog writing unsent letters to everyone who has wronged him; less exuberant than Henderson but more moving. - 3Buy
Humboldt's Gift
Saul Bellow·1975·Bellow's Pulitzer-winning novel — a writer reckoning with the legacy of a brilliant, destroyed friend; more autobiographical and more melancholy than Henderson.
Henderson the Rain King — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Henderson the Rain King part of a series?
No — all of Bellow's novels are standalones. Herzog (1964) and Henderson (1959) are often paired as his two great confessional novels of the early 1960s, but they have no plot or character connections.
Is Henderson the Rain King Saul Bellow's best novel?
Most literary critics consider Herzog (1964), Humboldt's Gift (1975), or Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) Bellow's finest achievements. Henderson is often called the most purely enjoyable — the most comic, the most high-energy — but the consensus tends to place Herzog slightly higher as the most artistically controlled.
What is the significance of Africa in Henderson the Rain King?
Bellow has been criticized for his depiction of Africa and Africans in Henderson — Edward Said and Chinua Achebe both wrote about the novel's debt to the colonial imagination of Africa as a place for white protagonists to find themselves. The criticism is well-founded: Bellow uses Africa as a backdrop for Henderson's spiritual transformation rather than as a place with its own interior life. Readers should approach the novel with this context.
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