Overview

After living abroad for 20 years, Henry James returned to his native America and travelled down the East Coast from Boston to Florida. This a journal describing his feelings on the rediscovery of the New York of his childhood, and the growth of modern commercial America. He muses on Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson; in Washington, he finds a cityscape devoid of spiritual symbols; in Richmond, thoughts of the civil war haunt him. Published in 1907, this journal also served as a farewell address to the country James would never live in again.

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9780140434163

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Reviews

While Jamesians will almost certainly applaud this new edition of the master's analysis of American life first published in 1906, less dedicated readers are just as likely to echo William James' words when he testily advised his brother, For God's sake, Henry, spit it out. Written in James' most hermetic mature style, this extended reminiscence, a Sargasso of convoluted clauses and tangled metaphorical phrases, recounts the author's ambivalent reactions to returning to his native land after an absence of a quarter-century. An American literary giant at his most recondite - and exasperating. James' 10-month visit coincided almost exactly with a tour of the American East undertaken by H.G. Wells and reported by him in his The Future in America, also recently reissued by St. Martin's (see below). The two authors' approaches to their subject are revelatory. The British writer/scientist turns his attention outward to such matters as power plants and social inequities; the expatriate American turns inward to record his shifting states of mind. Wells' subject is America and Americans; James', Henry James himself. During his peregrinations, James revisits many scenes of his youth: Washington Square; Concord and Salem, Massachusetts; Philadelphia. His descriptions of these sites are suffused with nostalgia, and it is with the gentler aspects of the scenes that James concerns himself rather than with the more dramatic recent changes he finds after his 25-year sojourn across the Atlantic. Truth to tell, James seems more European than American in his reactions to an America which was at the time wracked with social unrest. James leaves the matters of muckraking and trustbusting, scientific and social changes largely unexplored. Appreciation of his efforts will depend on just how interested the reader is in the workings of a complex mind described with compulsive thoroughness, and more than a little murkiness. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Henry James (1843-1916), born in New York City, was the son of noted religious philosopher Henry James, Sr., and brother of eminent psychologist and philosopher William James. He spent his early life in America and studied in Geneva, London and Paris during his adolescence to gain the worldly experience so prized by his father. He lived in Newport, went briefly to Harvard Law School, and in 1864 began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines.In 1869, and then in 1872-74, he paid visits to Europe and began his first novel, Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875 he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola, and wrote The American (1877). In December 1876 he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. Other famous works include Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and three large novels of the new century, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1905 he revisited the United States and wrote The American Scene (1907). During his career he also wrote many works of criticism and travel. Although old and ailing, he threw himself into war work in 1914, and in 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject. In 1916 King George V conferred the Order of Merit on him. He died in London in February 1916.

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