Hawthorne: (english Men of Letters Series)
1879
In 1879, Henry James turned his formidable analytical powers on his predecessor in American letters, producing not merely a biography but a profound meditation on what it meant to write as an American. James examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's quiet life in Salem, his Puritan ancestry, and the way this background shaped a literature of moral subtlety and psychological depth. But James is also writing about himself and his own ambivalent relationship to American culture, the limitations he perceived in American society's lack of depth and history, yet the strange vitality of its raw, untutored energy. The essay becomes a document of transatlantic literary politics, revealing James's own journey toward European sophistication while grappling with what he might be leaving behind. Here is one master assessing another, and in doing so, defining the terms by which American literature would come to understand itself.
