Recommendations
Books Like The American
Best books to read after The American by Henry James
Henry James's first major international novel (1877) follows Christopher Newman, a wealthy, good-natured American businessman in Paris who falls in love with the aristocratic Claire de Cintré and is defeated by the European social logic he cannot understand. These recommendations extend the experience through James's other international novels, through other American-in-Europe fiction, and through novels that explore the encounter between American optimism and European complexity.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
The masterwork that follows The American and deepens its international theme: Isabel Archer's story is the full-scale tragic version of the American-in-Europe situation that The American handles in its simpler form. Where Newman is defeated by European social codes he cannot understand, Isabel is defeated by the idealism that is both her greatest quality and her greatest vulnerability.
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Daisy Miller
by Henry James
Published the same year as The American and the most direct companion piece: Daisy Miller's American innocence in Rome is the feminine version of Newman's American optimism in Paris. Both novellas are organized around the encounter between American naturalness and European social artifice, and both end in the American's defeat.
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The Europeans
by Henry James
James's comic inversion of The American's situation: where The American sends an American to be defeated in Europe, The Europeans brings Europeans to be domesticated in America. Reading The Europeans alongside The American gives you James's two most accessible statements of the international theme, comic and serious, before encountering its fully tragic development in The Portrait of a Lady.
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The Ambassadors
by Henry James
James's late masterpiece on the international theme and the novel he himself considered his finest: Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to retrieve a young American from European influence, and gradually comes to understand that what he was sent to rescue the young man from is exactly what his own life has lacked. The Ambassadors is The American deepened by thirty years of thought.
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The Bostonians
by Henry James
James's American novel — set not in Europe but in Boston reform culture — that shows how the international theme translates into a domestic American context: the encounter between the Southern conservative Basil Ransom and the Boston feminist Olive Chancellor over the soul of the young orator Verena Tarrant is the American version of James's characteristic collision between incompatible worlds.
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Washington Square
by Henry James
James's most Austenian novel and the work that most clearly shows his interest in the economic dimension of the marriage market: Catherine Sloper's pursuit by the charming, penniless Morris Townsend in 1840s New York is the American domestic version of Newman's pursuit of Claire de Cintré in Paris — both are stories of an American whose genuine feelings are exploited by someone who wants something else.
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The Innocents Abroad
by Mark Twain
The comic counterpart to The American's international theme: Twain's irreverent American tourists in Europe are the popular culture version of James's sophisticated Christopher Newman, and Twain's skepticism about European cultural pretension is the American vernacular response to the same encounter that James handles with psychological seriousness. Reading both together shows you the full range of American responses to Europe.
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A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
The English novel that most closely parallels The American's international theme: Lucy Honeychurch's encounter with the unconventional Emersons in Florence and her liberation from the conventional Cecil Vyse represents the English version of the American-in-Europe encounter. Forster treats the same collision between English propriety and Italian vitality that James treats between American innocence and French aristocracy.
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