Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

Peter Brooks

feb 2025 · New York Review of Books

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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.

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Peter Brooks is the author of several books, including the nonfiction titles The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, and Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, as well as two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor’s Body. He published Balzac’s Lives with New York Review Books in 2020, and has edited two NYRB Classics, Balzac’s The Human Comedy: Selected Stories and Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale.