Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

Gloria Cronin (Brigham Young University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1959

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

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Henderson the Rain King

(1959), undoubtedly Bellow’s most loved book, offers his most trenchant and comic analysis of literary modernism. Unfortunately it also enacts all of the racial ideologies of the colonial archive. Through its parody and satire, Bellow renders laughable many of Modernism’s philosophical banalities. Eugene Henderson, one of his few WASP protagonists, is a burlesque of the absurd, violent, artist-hero of the Stephan Daedalus variety. Violinist and pig farmer, he is a menopausal social outcast. A direct parody of the Hemingway stoic or narcissist, he is metaphysically earnest, introspective, solipsistic, bumbling, and egocentric. He believes, along with his Eliotic fisher king forbears, that there is a curse on the land. He is Bellow’s answer to a…

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539 words

Citation: Cronin, Gloria. "Henderson the Rain King". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4800, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

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