Perkins is an associate professor of English and American literature and film at Prince George's Community College and has published several articles on British and American authors. In this essay, she examines images of women in Bellow's novel.

"Nobody truly occupies a station in life any more. There are mostly people who feel that they occupy the place that belongs to another by rights. There are displaced persons everywhere." Earl Rovit, in his article on Saul Bellow in American Writers, determines that these words spoken by Eugene Henderson in Bellow's highly acclaimed novel Henderson the Rain King "could have been spoken by almost any of Bellow's characters or, for that matter, by Bellow himself." Rovit finds that a major theme in Bellow's fiction is how we cope with a sense of alienation and displacement.

This is also the case with Moses Herzog, the hero of Bellow's award-winning...