Henry James Comes Home

""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