Peter Brooks Publishes Henry James Comes Home

The Yale Koerner Center is pleased to highlight the publication of Henry James Comes Home by Peter Brooks, released by the New York Review of Books. In this work, Professor Brooks revisits Henry James’s ten-month journey across the United States in 1904—a trip the novelist undertook after more than twenty years abroad. Confronting a dramatically transformed America, James sought to reconnect with a homeland that had become, in his view, central to the world’s future yet markedly changed in character.

Professor Brooks focuses on this pivotal journey and the resulting book, The American Scene, blending biography and literary criticism to retrace James’s observations as he traveled through the country, all the way to the Pacific Northwest. The work offers insight into James’s complex relationship with his native country, as well as his reflections on materialism, democracy, and identity in the early twentieth century.

Henry James Comes Home serves as a companion to Professor Brooks’s earlier volume, Henry James Goes to Paris, and contributes to ongoing discussions of James’s enduring relevance in American literary and cultural history.

Profssor Brooks is a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was the founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center. He taught also at the University of Virginia and Princeton, and as a visitor at Oxford, the University of Bologna, and the University of Copenhagen. He has published on narrative, psychoanalysis, and law, largely in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature; in addition, he is author of two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor’s Body. His critical books include The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, Enigmas of Identity, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Balzac’s Lives, and Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.

For more information on the book, click here.