For all the nineteenth-century journalists who, in calling upon their countrymen to create a truly American literature, tried to explain what it should be, and for all the twentieth-century scholars and critics who have since tried to explain what it is, the aim has always been to establish between Europe and America a literary boundary as distinct as the Atlantic Ocean. This task has been both necessary and impossible for the same reason: what we call American literature simply does not have the sort of prima facie identity that the North American continent and the United States do. Even the most original and idiosyncratic works of American literature were written in a European language by persons steeped in transatlantic culture and whose idea of literature itself was based primarily upon European poetry, fiction, and drama. To be sure, the great American writers are unique. But great writing is unique by definition. Like writers everywhere, these Americans have cultivated uniqueness not so much to isolate themselves from the rest of the literary world, past and present, as to earn a place in that world by adding something new to it. Even Mark Twain and Whitman wanted seats in the literary pantheon, alongside Cervantes and Shakespeare, far more than they wanted a chapter in some future anthology of American literature. What is more, whenever some American has managed to do something unprecedented, something that might set American literature apart, their European colleagues have immediately incorporated this new development into their own work, thereby erasing the difference the moment it appeared.

The more logical question to ask about American literature, then, is not “What makes it different?” but “What difference has it made?” How has it affected the course of modern literary history, of which it has always been, willy-nilly, an inextricable part? The American is especially well suited to the study of this question by virtue of the work’s peculiarly intimate connection with the personal life and artistic development of the first American to be generally recognized as a major figure in a major international literary movement. the development of modern fiction. The idea for the novel came to James (very much as the idea of quitting business and going to Europe comes to Newman) while he was riding down Broadway in a horse-car one day in the winter of 1874. James had recently returned from one of the several extended tours that had already occupied more than a quarter of his peripatetic youth. Not long after he was born, in 1843, his father, the Swedenborgian theologian for whom Henry was named, took him and his older brother William, who was to become the great American pragmatic philosopher, abroad to escape the limitations of provincial culture and education. For the next thirty years, James divided his time between Europe, where he traveled at first with his family and then alone, and such American bastions of Old World culture as Washington Place and Newport, where he changed schools and tutors repeatedly, and Cambridge, where he studied the law and began, in 1864, to publish reviews, stories, and critical essays in the literary quarterlies.

Having just completed Roderick Hudson, his second novel and the first to employ the international theme essayed in such earlier tales as “A Passionate Pilgrim” and “An International Episode,” James was determined to make his living as a writer. For the time being, that meant hack work for the journals and newspapers, but he longed for the day when, like Newman, he could give up the commercial life and seek a richer fortune in Europe. After many delays, that day finally came in the fall of 1875, when James left New York for an indefinite stay in Paris. By the following April he was at work on The American, the character of Christopher Newman having arisen in his mind exactly as that personage first appears in the novel, “on a perfect day of the divine Paris spring, in the great gilded Salon Carré of the Louvre.”

Although James later remembered writing the novel “off the top of his head,” the period of composition appears to have been a particularly anxious time for him. To cover the expense of his European venture, the novel would have to be a popular success. To justify his contention that he could do better work by leaving America, it would have to be a critical success as well. The rightness of the most difficult and ultimately controversial decision he would ever make hung on the outcome of The American. Little wonder, then, that the novel reflects some of these anxieties. When the first installment appeared, in the June 1876 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the later chapters were not yet written, and James and his hero were both beginning to feel very much at home in Paris. But by the time the last installment came out, twelve months later, Newman had been rejected by the Bellegardes, and James had come to realize that he, too, would never be admitted into what he considered real Parisian society. The first American edition of the novel was hardly in the reviewers’ hands when James abandoned the “detestable American Paris” to settle in London.

With The American and his Parisian difficulties behind him, James began the literary career that was initially to bring him the popularity and critical esteem he longed for and then to carry him far beyond his readers and reviewers alike into an unmapped region of novelistic art that would remain largely unsettled well into the present century. In a very important sense, however, The American was not behind him at all, for at each major stage of that increasingly lonely career, Newman’s story would reappear in a guise appropriate to the occasion. Just as the conception, composition, and serial publication of the novel had accompanied the anxious process of expatriation, the generally favorable reception of its first American edition started James on his brief rise to popularity. The first English edition appeared in 1879, alongside the hugely successful Daisy Miller, which made him famous by making his American heroine notorious, and his critical biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which announced James’s literary farewell to America and his entry into London society. The inclusion of The American in the first uniform edition of his fiction, printed in London in 1883, marks his arrival at artistic and personal maturity following the completion of his first acknowledged masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and his long-postponed decision, upon the death of his parents in 1882, to reside abroad permanently.

A decade later, when James turned from fiction to the drama in hopes of securing both his reputation and his finances with a great theatrical success, he began by turning The American into a play. And as the novel had heralded his rise to popularity and critical reputation, the play signaled a decline that would continue virtually unchecked until more than a decade after his death in 1916. The novels of the 1890s—The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Sacred Fount—repelled readers because of their forbidding “scenic” style, which James had learned in the theatre and would combine with the international theme of The American to produce the three great novels of his last, “major” phase—The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1905, after revisiting America for the first time in over twenty years, James rewrote The American one last time, revising it extensively in the style of these masterpieces for inclusion in the New York Edition of his works, his final attempt to regain the American reading public he had long since left behind.

At each of these crucial stages of his progress, James appears to have felt the need to rescue The American from the receding past by bringing it abreast of the latest development in his art and to renew his contacts with his American beginnings.