The American (1877) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

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Summary edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Christopher Newman: Add a description of this character.
• Madame De Cintre
• Valentin De Bellegarde
• Madame De Bellegarde
• Mrs. Tristram
• M. De Bellegarde
• M. Nioche
• Mrs. Bread
• Mademoiselle Noemie
• Deepmere
• Mr. Babcock
• Madame Urbain
• M. Ledoux
• Claire
• Mademoiselle Noernie
• M. De Cintre
• M. De Grosjoyaux
• Tom Tristram
• M. Stanislas Kapp
• M. Kapp
• Madonna

Quotes edit see section history

• “Newman was silent awhile. "Well, I want a great woman. I stick to that. That's one thing I can treat myself to, and if it's to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for all these years? I've succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a lovely being perched on the pile like some shining statue crowning some high monument...I want, in a word, the best article in the market."”

  This excerpt from a conversation around the Tristrams' Parisian dinner table in the middle of Chapter 3 explicitly defines one motivating force of the story.

• “Madame de Cintré rose quickly and grasped his arm. "Ah Valentin, what do you mean to do?""To show Mr Newman the house. It will be very amusing to show Mr Newman the house....It's full of curious things. Besides a visit like Mr Newman's is just what it wants and has never had. It's a rare chance all round.""You're very wicked, brother," Madame de Cintré insisted.”

  This quotation comes from the middle of Chapter 6 during Newman's first successful visit to the Bellegarde mansion, wherein he is invited to join Claire and Valentin around the fire.

• “"There's something in your situation that rubs me up. You're the first man about whom I've ever found myself saying 'Oh, if I were he—!' ... It's a sort of air you have of being imperturbably, being irremovably and indestructibly (that's the thing) at home in the world. When I was a boy my father assured me it was by just such an air that people recognized a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He didn't advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me because I think I've always had the feeling it represents. My place in life had been made for me and it seemed easy to occupy. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have made and sold articles of vulgar household use—you strike me, in a fashion of your own, as a man who stands about at his ease and looks straight over ever so many high walls.”

  This passage in the middle of Chapter 7 is part of the first extended conversation between Newman and Valentin.

• “He mused a great deal on Madame de Cintré—sometimes with a dull despair that might have seemed a near neighbor to detachment. He lived over again the happiest hours he had known - that silver chain of numbered days... He had yet held in his cheated arms, he felt, the full experience, and when he closed them together round the void that was all they now possessed, he might have been some solitary spare athlete practicing restlessly in the corridor of the circus.”

  Here, at the beginning of Chapter 26, the narrator describes Newman's attempts in London to come to terms with the loss of Claire. In the short space of a year, Newman has felt the most intense love and the most complete devastation of his worldly forty-three years.

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type; but the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend's countenance was supremely eloquent.

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• In America, Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.

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• different things. A beauty has no faults in her face, the face of a beautiful woman may have faults that only deepen its charm.

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• Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman's first duty is not to be beautiful, but to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission.

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• One's theories, after all, matter little; it is one's humor that is the great thing.

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• She had been in love with a clever man who had slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing that she cared for his own.

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• Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was, as I have said before, eminently incomplete.

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• She was full—both for good and for ill—of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.

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• house—what had he to say to her? She seemed enveloped in a sort of fantastic privacy; on what grounds had he pulled away the curtain? For a moment

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• Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Paris
• Europe
• Fleurieres
• Poitiers
• America
• France
• Bellegardes
• San Francisco
• New York
• Switzerland
• England
• Venice
• London
• Count Valentin
• Geneva
• Heaven
• Dublin

First Sentence edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Henry James (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.4

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( J ) › James, Henry
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › 19th Century
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics