Bellow's Henderson the Rain King

About Henderson the Rain King

Henderson the Rain King (1959) is Saul Bellow's funniest and most exuberantly romantic novel — the story of Eugene Henderson, a Connecticut millionaire of fifty-five haunted by a voice crying 'I want, I want, I want!' who travels to Africa in search of transformation and becomes, improbably, the Rain King of a fictional African kingdom. Bellow was writing in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century comic novels — Dickens, Mark Twain — and Henderson is his most nakedly romantic hero: too large for his world in every sense, willing to be ridiculous in the pursuit of a transformed self. Published between The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Herzog (1964), Henderson represents Bellow's most externalized and physical mode of the same concerns those novels address through picaresque adventure and interior suffering respectively. It is the most immediately enjoyable entry point to Bellow's fiction and the novel most recommended for readers who find his other work too cerebral.