Ivory Tower

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 <i>The Ivory Tower</i> 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. <p/>James died in 1916 with the first three books of <i>The Ivory Tower </i>completed. He also left behind a treatment in which he charted the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario one of only two to survive among James's papers is also published here together with a striking critical essay by Ezra Pound.