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By Henry James • Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst
In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of America's Gilded Age. After an absence of more than twenty years, James had returned for a visit to his native country; what he found there filled him with profound dismay. In The Ivory Tower, his last book, the characteristic pattern underlying so much of his fiction—in which American "innocence"is transformed by its encounter with European "experience"—receives a new twist: raised abroad, the hero comes home to America to confront, as James puts it, "the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions." Set among the great houses and sweeping seaviews of Newport, Rhode Island, with the backroom deals and enduring animosities of New York's financial world lurking in the background, The Ivory Tower explores the predicaments of the heirs to two rival tycoons. James died in 1916 with this novel unfinished, but leaving behind a "treatment," charting the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario, one of only two to survive among James's papers, is published here, with a striking essay by Ezra Pound.
PB • 5" x 8" • 296 p
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