Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Name: Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
Author: Michael Gorra
ISBN: 9780871403285

Michael Gorra

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Michael Gorra

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#1060 of 3,809 books · #402 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (2013) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (2012).

Portrait of a Novel won the Pulitzer Prize as a finalist and was named one of the Best Books of 2012 by The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, and Boston Phoenix. A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James's family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

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