Books with title The Russian Americans

Henry James's third novel is an exploration of his most powerful, perennial theme - the clash between European and American cultures, the Old World and the New. Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes' past, he confronts a moral dilemma: Should he expose them and thus gain his revenge? James's masterly early work is at once a social comedy, a melodramatic romance and a realistic novel of manners.

This ebook includes a biographical introduction, a short, critical analysis of James' career and a brief introduction to this work.Originally serialised in the Atlantic Monthly between 1876 and 1877 then published in book form within a year, The American was James' second novel after Roderick Hudson. The plot, which eventually runs amok, concerns the efforts of Christopher Newman, a wealthy American businessman, to marry the beautiful French widow Claire de Cintre. Newman's progress, which at times runs counter to the wishes of Cintre's family and at other times to their tune, is further complicated by hidden secrets and social mores. Unfortunately, while the first half of the book keeps matters under restraint, it seems James literally lost the plot during the second half, allowing all the available threads to find their own limits rather than tying them onto the central thread of Newman's pursuit. This fraying of the threads creates a sense of mayhem that is unusual in a James novel in which, typically, the plot is underdone.

The American is a novel by Henry James, originally published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1876–77 and then as a book in 1877. The novel is an uneasy combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th-century American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of Europe, and learns not to take either for granted. The core of the novel concerns Newman's courtship of a young widow from an aristocratic Parisian family. (wikipedia.org)

The American was popular as one of the first international novels contrasting the rising and forceful New World and the cultured but sinful Old World. The American is an uneasy combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th century American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of Europe, and learns not to take either for granted. The core of the novel concerns Newman's courtship of a young widow from an aristocratic Parisian family.

Whether my bones are to rest in this great valley, or west of the Cordilleras, or the Rocky Mountains, I know not. I shall often think of the silver Iosco, the farther I go from it. To use a native metaphor, My foot is on the path, and the word, is onward! "The spider taketh hold with her hands," Solomon says, "and is in king's palaces." Truly, a man should accomplish, by diligence, as much as a spider.Pittsburgh was, even then, a busy manufacturing town, filled with working machinery, steam engines, hammers, furnaces, and coal smoke. I visited Mr. O'Hara, and several other leading manufacturers. They made glass, bar iron, nails, coarse pottery, castings, and many other articles, which filled its shops and warehouses, and gave it a city-like appearance. Every chimney and pipe, perpendicular or lateral, puffed out sooty coal smoke, and it required some dexterity to keep a clean collar half a day. I met ladies who bore this impress of the city, on their morning toilet. I took lodgings at Mrs.

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. 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 Madonna 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 vigor that is commonly known as “toughness.” But his exertions on this particular day had been of an unwonted sort, and he had 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; his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an æsthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces, and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original. His physiognomy would have sufficiently indicated that he was a shrewd and capable fellow, and in truth he had often sat up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind of arithmetic, and they inspired our friend, for the first time in his life, with a vague self-mistrust.An observer with anything of an eye for national types would have had no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould. The gentleman on the divan was a powerful specimen of an American. But he was not only a fine American; he was in the first place, physically, a fine man. He appeared to possess that kind of health and strength which, when found in perfection, are the most impressive—the physical capital which the owner does nothing to “keep up.”- Taken from "The American" written by Henry James