The American

The American is a novel by Henry James, first serialised in the Atlantic Monthly from 1876 to 1877 and published in book form in 1877. It is the book where James first found a wide audience, and it is still one of the easier entry points into his work for readers willing to try the early period.

Christopher Newman is a wealthy American businessman who has made his money in San Francisco and arrives in Paris in his middle thirties, looking for the kind of refined European life he was never able to have in California. He meets and falls in love with Claire de Cintre, a young widow from one of the old French aristocratic families. The Bellegardes initially accept Newman’s suit, mostly because they need the money he can supply, but then they change their minds in a way that turns the second half of the novel into something close to a tragedy.

The shape of the plot is melodrama, with a family secret and a possible blackmail and a confrontation, but the writing pulls against the melodrama. James is more interested in Newman’s slow discovery that money does not in fact buy entrance to the closed world he is trying to join. Newman is a good man, decent and generous, and he is also somewhat naive in a way that James shows without ever quite mocking him.

The ending was controversial. James himself was not happy with the original published version and rewrote it for the New York Edition years later. Both versions are still read, and the original is in some ways more powerful because of the bleakness it allows. For new James readers this is a much friendlier place to start than the late novels. The plot moves, the characters are easy to keep track of, and the international comedy and pain that runs through everything James wrote is here in its first major shape.