Name: Henry James Comes Home
Price: 11.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Peter Brooks
ISBN: 9781681379227

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.

“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

“Henry James Comes Home attends to the quotidian detail of the writer’s journey – his struggles with gout and laundry, the complex and intermittent hostilities with his brother William – as well as to the multiple contexts that make up its cultural moment.” —Alicia Rix, TLS

“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

“Peter Brooks traces James’s journey with a fine-toothed comb and smart touches of perceptive, knowing humor…a work that will delight both the James enthusiast as well as the newcomer.”
—Ryan Asmussen, Chicago Review of Books

“With Henry James Comes Home, Brooks has given a tremendous gift to James’s devotees, an astute, discerning investigation into James’s complex accord with his homeland and its people.”
—William Giraldi, The Baffler

“Over the decades, whether Brooks rowed against the critical currents or those currents were belatedly catching up with him, he has remained one of the few literary critics who could write sentences and paragraphs with clarity, concision, and even beauty in them. His books, while energized with critical perspective and opinion, don’t wear readers down with a lot of academic jargon. And he is often as pleasurable to read as the artists he writes about.” —Scott Bradfield, The New Republic

“An engagingly articulate combination of criticism, biography, and celebration.” —Bill Marx, The Arts Fuse

Henry James Comes Home

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By Peter Brooks