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Henry James Comes Home

Henry James Comes Home

Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

by Peter Brooks

Regular price $18.95
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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: 256
Publication Date:

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