The American Essays of Henry James

by James, Henry; Edel, Leon

• ISBN13: 9780691014715
• ISBN10: 069101471X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-01-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

"No one, among American writers, was more contemporary or had a more powerful grasp of American history and American myth," writes Leon Edel of Henry James. This collection of James's essays on American letters, together with some of his miscellaneous writings on other American subjects, is a pivotal document in the reassessment of James as less cloistered--and more American--than previously supposed. James is relaxed and informal as he writes of Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, Godkin, Norton, and Howells: he is fondly recalling--but also criticizing--the cultural orthodoxy in which he was reared. The American Essays remarkably prefigures current efforts to revise and challenge the aesthetic idealism of the Emersonian tradition.

Author Biography

Leon Edel, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author is Professor of English Emeritus at New York University

Table of Contents

Foreword to the New Edition	p. vii
Introduction	p. xi
The New England Voice
Hawthorne's French and Italian Journals	p. 3
Nathaniel Hawthorne	p. 11
The Hawthorne Centenary	p. 24
The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson	p. 31
Emerson	p. 51
James Russell Lowell	p. 77
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)	p. 106
An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton	p. 118
Other Voices
Mr. Walt Whitman	p. 131
Francis Parkman: The Old Regime in Canada	p. 138
William Dean Howells	p. 146
Letter to William Dean Howells on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday	p. 156
Miss Woolson	p. 162
Wolcott Balestier	p. 175
The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland	p. 186
American Letters 1898
The Question of the Opportunities	p. 197
The American Novel	p. 204
Grant's Letters; Whitman's Calamus	p. 208
Democracy and Theodore Roosevelt	p. 212
Winston Churchill; Bret Harte	p. 216
Whitman's The Wound Dresser	p. 220
Local History; American Criticism	p. 224
Military Novels	p. 228
American Magazines; John Jay Chapman	p. 233
American Democracy and American Education	p. 241
The Novel of Dialect; W. D. Howells	p. 250
American Memories
Mr. and Mrs. Fields	p. 261
Notes for an Essay on Mr. and Mrs. Fields	p. 281
The Founding of the Nation	p. 284
Index	p. 289
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