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Henry James Comes Home

Henry James Comes Home

Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

by Peter Brooks

$18.95
$18.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir
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In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. 

James's ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James's American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California, and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James's keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681379210
Pages: 248
Publication Date:

Praise

America in 1904 had become a world power—but was it still as culturally thin as the country that in the 1880s Henry James had left behind? That’s the question he asked in The American Scene, the great strange book he made out of a ten-months’ tour, and one he could never quite answer.  In his sympathy and skepticism alike Peter Brooks is the best of all possible guides to the novelist’s last struggle with his native land, and Henry James Comes Home is as wise, as learned, and as occasionally intemperate as the Master himself.
—Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

What a brilliant idea—to trace Henry James’s late-life return to his native land, chronicled in The American Scene. Peter Brooks is the ideal guide to that 1904 account, offering his own astute reflections on the places, people, and dramatic national changes the novelist encountered, as well as on the great themes of his art.
—Jean Strouse

A treasure for the uninitiated reader and the card-carrying Jamesian alike. With his characteristic blend of deep erudition, psychoanalytic acuity, and wry humor, Peter Brooks tracks Henry James's every movement across the United States, which grows stranger and more maddeningly beautiful with each stop along the way. Henry James Comes Home reminded me why Brooks is my favorite living literary critic.
—Merve Emre

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