The Returning New Yorker

After examining three stories which preceded James’s return visit to the United States in 1904–1905, this chapter discusses the exceptional literary outcome of that stay – The American Scene, the New York Edition, the late New York stories, such as “The Jolly Corner”, and the autobiography A Small Boy and Others which James wrote after his last trip home of 1910–1911. In particular, the chapter aims to show the ambivalence of James’s response to twentieth-century New York, a city in which, as The American Scene and his late stories testify, the encroachment of business values, the desecration of tradition, the subjugation of the vulnerable (be they human beings or buildings) – namely those traits he had previously highlighted – had come to frightful fruition. At the same time, this chapter delves into James’s at times irrepressible enjoyment of New York’s energy and scope and his act of reclaiming his birthplace through his autobiography.