The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels. New York, 1960.

Veeder, William. Henry James: The Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, 1975.

STUDIES OF JAMES AS AN AMERICAN
AND AS A EUROPEAN WRITER

Grover, Philip. Henry James and the French Novel: A Study in Inspiration. New York, 1973.

Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London, 1948.

Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London, 1921.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. New York, 1941.

Porte, Joel. The Romance in America. Middletown, Conn., 1969.

Rourke, Constance. American Humor. New York, 1931.

Spender, Stephen. Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities. New York, 1974.

Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. New York, 1970.

A Note on the Text

The American exists in a bewildering array of printed forms, from the earliest version, which appeared in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly between June 1876 and May 1877, to the most recent commercial edition. Of those published in James’s lifetime, however, only two can be considered fully authorized texts: the first English edition, published by Macmillan and Company in 1879, which is the earliest version that James is known to have seen in proof, and the New York Edition of 1907, which he revised extensively in the style of his late novels. The respective merits of these two very different versions have been endlessly debated over the years, in accompaniment to the dispute concerning the “American” and the “modern” Henry James. Since my notion is that The American is James’s prelude to the modern, I have elected to present the novel in its earlier, “unmodernized” form. The text that follows, then, is that of the 1879 Macmillan Edition, emended to incorporate a number of typographical corrections made by Macmillan’s editors in preparing the 1883 uniform edition and by James when he prepared the New York Edition; a change in the paragraphing of a passage at the end of Chapter XI, as proposed by Hershel Parker (“An Error in the Text of Henry James’s The American,” American Literature 38 [1965]: 316-18); and two or three minor alterations of my own, which are explained in the notes.

The American

Chapter I.

On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre.1 This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts; but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna2 in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead, with a somewhat wearied gesture. And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigour that is commonly known as “toughness.” But his exertions on this particular day had been of an unwonted sort, and he had often performed great physical feats which left him less jaded than his tranquil stroll through the Louvre. He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed in those formidable pages of fine print in his Bädeker;3 his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an æsthetic headache.