Henderson the Rain King

Saul Bellow?s Pulitzer Prize?winning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie?s life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and he?s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.

-V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books

In this unique noir masterpiece by the incomparable Saul Bellow, a young man is sucked into the mysterious, heat-filled vortex of New York City. Asa Leventhal, a temporary bachelor with his wife away on a visit to her mother, attempts to find relief from a Gotham heat wave, only to be accosted in the park by a down-at-the-heels stranger who accuses Leventhal of ruining his life. Unable to shake the stranger loose, Leventhal is led by his own self-doubts and suspicions into a nightmare of paranoia and fear.

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) is the author of nearly twenty works of literature, including Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, The Victim, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift. He taught at the University of Chicago and Boston University. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at the New Republic and a columnist for the Tablet. He lives in New York City.