Farewell to America

Farewell to America is a book by Henry Nevinson, the English journalist, war correspondent, and writer who lived from 1856 to 1941 and who was one of the most respected English journalists of his generation. Nevinson produced a substantial body of journalism, travel writing, and political and social commentary across a long working career, much of it focused on the various political and humanitarian causes that occupied his attention.

Nevinson had spent substantial periods in the United States during the various phases of his career, including reporting trips during which he had observed American political and social life at first hand and had developed his own substantial views about the country and its place in the modern world. The book Farewell to America belongs to his American writings and presents his observations and reflections on the country at a particular moment in his relationship with it.

The farewell of the title gives the basic frame of the book. Nevinson is presenting what is essentially his final substantive set of observations and reflections on the United States, drawing on his various periods of residence and travel in the country and offering to his English audience the kind of considered assessment that an experienced foreign observer could provide. The book combines specific observations of American places, people, and institutions with broader reflections on American national character, American political culture, the American role in the international situation, and the various other questions that an English observer of the United States in the early twentieth century would naturally take up.

Nevinson had a particular position as an English observer of America. He was sympathetic to American democratic culture and to the various American reform movements that paralleled the reform movements he himself supported in England, while also being clear sighted about the various aspects of American society that he found less admirable. The book reflects this balanced approach. He is willing to praise where praise is due and willing to criticize where criticism is appropriate, in the manner that the best of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century English observers of America were able to manage.

The book is of moderate length and reads as sustained personal essay rather than as formal political analysis. For readers interested in English observation of American life during the early twentieth century, Nevinson is one of the more substantial writers in the tradition. It pairs naturally with his other American and political writings.