We must of course have something of our own—something distinctive and homogeneous—and I take it that we shall find it in our moral consciousness, our unprecedented spiritual lightness and vigour.”

Measured against James’s own standard, The American is less American than, say, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, both of which had caught the vigorous New World spirit of moral adventure and its powers of creative action. But if The American did not itself achieve that “vast intellectual fusion and synthesis” of Old World forms and New World energies, there is no doubt that the novel helped James to define the conditions of that achievement. The Henry James who wrote the novel was en route from the New World to the Old, but the novel he wrote was taking him from the Old World, in which legendary moral form and amoral human energy confronted each other across an estranging Atlantic, to the New World that was born with the discovery of America. Like the Newman who emerges from his Parisian adventure, the Henry James who emerges from the novel is neither an American nor a European in the old, differentiating sense. A sojourner in both places, but at home in neither, he has risen above Old World geography into a lonely region where form and energy, detached from their native hemispheres, circle about each other endlessly in the powerfully energetic and highly formal dance of modern art.

—William Spengemann

Suggestions for
Further Reading

CHECKLISTS OF CRITICISM

McColgan, Kristin P., ed. Henry James, 1917-1959: A Reference Guide. Boston, 1979.

Scura, Dorothy M., ed. Henry James, 1960-1974: A Reference Guide. Boston, 1979.

COLLECTIONS AND EDITIONS

The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New and Complete Edition. Edited by Percy Lubbock. 35 vols. London, 1921-23.

The Complete Tales of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel. 12 vols. London, 1962-65.

The Complete Plays of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel. Philadelphia and New York, 1949.

Henry James: Autobiography. Edited by F. W. Dupee. New York, 1956.

The Letters of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel. 3 vols. (to 1895). Cambridge, Mass., 1974-80.

The Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and K. B. Murdock.