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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 ...
- Henry James, Houghton Library, Rodney G. Dennis
- 1877
The American, novel by Henry James, published serially in 1876 in The Atlantic Monthly and in book form a year later and produced as a four-act play in 1891. The American is the story of a self-made American millionaire, Christopher Newman, whose guilelessness and forthrightness are set in contrast.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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. Christopher Newman, a ‘self-made’ American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde.
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- Mass Market Paperback
The American explores themes of identity, class, and cultural difference. Explore the full book summary, an in-depth character analysis of Christopher Newman, and explanations of important quotes from The American.
- THE CONTENDERS.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby’s magic emanates not only from its powerhouse poetic style—in which ordinary American language becomes unearthly—but from the authority with which it nails who we want to be as Americans.
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Among all Great American Novel candidates, perhaps Moby-Dick (1851) best meets Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s test. [“As long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.”]
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. [T]he Great American Novel is a moving target and that the space is filled by a novel that in any particular time best fulfills three main criteria
The Great American Novel (sometimes abbreviated as GAN) is the term for a canonical novel that generally embodies and examines the essence and character of the United States. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 1868 essay and later shortened to GAN.
Original essays by internationally renowned scholars present fresh readings of American classics and break new ground to show the role of popular genres such as science fiction and mystery novels in the creation of the US literary tradition.
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