Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America

English Hours | The American Scene | Other Travels More

Edited by Richard Howard

“Unmatched in travel literature…an incomparable record able to stand with his great novels.” — Elizabeth Hardwick

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Table of Contents

Overview

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Collected in this Library of America volume (and its companion) for the first time, Henry James’s travel books and essays display his distinctive charm and vivacity of style, his sensuous response to the beauty of place, and his penetrating, sometimes sardonically amusing analysis of national characteristics and customs. Observant, alert, imaginative, these works remain unsurpassed guides to the countries they describe, and they form an important part of James’s extraordinary achievement in literature.

This volume brings together James’s writing on Great Britain and America. The essays of English Hours (1905) convey the freshness of James’s “wonderments and judgments and emotions” on first encountering the country that became his adopted home for half a century. He captures the immensely varied life of London in a series of walks through that “murky, modern Babylon,” which contains “the most romantic town-vistas in the world.” Lively vignettes of a winter visit to an unfashionable watering place and excursions to the cathedral towns of Wells and Salisbury are followed by a haunting evocation of the desolate Suffolk coast at Dunwich. James includes the vivid account of a New Year’s weekend at a perfectly appointed country house, midsummer dog days in London, and the spectacle of the Derby at Epsom. In every essay he enriches his portrait of the English character, governed by social conventions and yet prone to startling eccentricities. Joseph Pennell’s delightful illustrations, which appeared in the original edition, are reprinted with James’s text.

In The American Scene (1907) James revisits his native country after a twenty-year absence, traveling throughout the eastern United States from Boston to Florida. Views of the Hudson River arouse memories of his own past—the river “seemed to stretch back. . . to the earliest outlook of my consciousness,” he writes. James’s poignant rediscovery of what remained of the New York of his childhood (“the precious stretch of street between Washington Square and Fourteenth Street”) contrasts with his impression of the modern, commercial New York, a new city representing “a particular type of dauntless power. . . crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history.” Edmund Wilson, who praised The American Scene’s “magnificent solidity and brilliance,” remarked that “it was as if. . . his emotions had suddenly been given scope, his genius for expression liberated.”

Sixteen essays on traveling in England, Scotland, and America conclude this volume. The essays, most of which have never been collected, range from early pieces on London, Saratoga, and Newport, to articles on World War One that are among James’s final writings.

Richard Howard, volume editor, is a critic, translator, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He is Professor of Practice in the School of the Arts of Columbia University.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

English Hours

Great Britain: Uncollected Travel Writings
London Sights
The Oxford-Cambridge Boat-Race
The Suburbs of London
London in the Dead Season
In Scotland
The Question of the Mind
Refugees in England
Within the Rim
The Long Wards

The American Scene

America: Early Travel Writings
Lake George
From Lake George to Burlington
Saratoga
Newport
Quebec
Niagara
Americans Abroad

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ISBN: 978-0-94045076-9 846 pages

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N° 64 Library of America Series

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