Henry James Comes Home - by Peter Brooks (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age. 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 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 width and 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"--

Book Synopsis

In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

"An illuminating exploration of the author's 10-month trip in 1904 from Britain to the land of his birth...Henry James Comes Home forms a poignant counterpart to Brooks's 2007 work Henry James Goes to Paris." --Katherine Chen, Daily Telegraph

"Brooks makes the convincing case that James's analysis of his own time might illuminate our own." --Anthony Domestico, Chronicle of Higher Education

About the Author

Peter Brooks is a literary critic and author of several books of nonfiction, including The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Henry James Goes to Paris, which won the Christian Gauss Award, and Seduced by Story, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is professor emeritus at Yale.