Wilfred Grenfell's history is that of a writer famed more for his life than for his books. He was the subject of numerous biographies, only one of which was written after his death; it is the best of them, taking the least-romanticized view of the man--J. Lennox Kerr's Wilfred Grenfell: His Life and Work (1959). Typically, though, it makes relatively little mention of Grenfell's writing, which includes some thirty books and hundreds of articles. At the height of his fame he was an internationally recognized figure, a compelling orator who was known to the rich and powerful and the nobility on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1958 the power of his presence for the contemporary imagination was most memorably evoked through the hero worship lavished on him by the bumbling protagonist of Saul Bellow's prize-winning novel Henderson, the Rain King--Eugene Henderson, would-be philanthropist, philosopher, and quintessential American idealist...