Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of "Henderson the Rain King", was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean in "The Dean's December", called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from "Dangling Man") is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.