One way of thinking about the other novels to read in conjunction with The American would be simply to take a cue from James himself. Near the end of his life James received an enquiry from a ‘delightful young man from Texas’ who wanted to know from the horse’s mouth which five novels he should read. James offered him two different lists. The first was comprised of Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl; the second of The American, The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. James cautioned that the second list was ‘as it were, the more “advanced”’ (letter of 14 September 1913, in Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. iv (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). Another way would be to set The American alongside some of the other novels and tales that use a Parisian setting. Most pertinent, because of their additional thematic resemblances, are The Reverberator (1888) and The Ambassadors (1903); but there is also The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Tragic Muse (1890), and amongst the tales, ‘Madame de Mauves’ (1874), ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ and ‘A Bundle of Letters’ (both 1879). One can also get a concerted sense of the fiction James was producing ‘around’ The American from the volume of tales which covers the years immediately before and after the time of its first writing in 1876: The Tales of Henry James, vol. iii, 1875–1879, ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford, 1984). The stage version(s) of the novel (see Appendix 1) may be read in The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1990).
Of James’s non-fictional writings the following are particularly relevant: French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878), A Little Tour in France (London, 1884), Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune, 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (London, 1958). Some of James’s correspondence for the year of the novel’s first writing can be read in Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. ii, 1875–1883 (London, 1978). For James’s collected reflections on the European writers important to his own ideas and practice—Balzac, Sand, Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, and others—see Literary Criticism, vol. ii: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel with the assistance of Mark Wilson (New York, 1984).
Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1883, vol. ii of The Life of Henry James (London, 1962).
Kenneth Graham, Henry James: A Literary Life (London, 1995). Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art (London, 1998)
Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (New York, 1992).
Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master (New York, 1996).
Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James (London, 1984).
Charles R. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham, NC, 1977).
John V. Antush, ‘The “Much Finer Complexity” of History in The American’, Journal of American Studies, 6 (1972), 85–95.
Martha Banta (ed.), New Essays on The American (Cambridge, 1987).
Mutlu Blasing, ‘Double Focus in The American’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 28 (1973), 74–84.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1976).
R. W. Butterfield, ‘The American’, in John Goode (ed.), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London, 1972).
Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1961).
Edwin Sill Fussell, The French Side of Henry James (New York, 1990).
——The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge, 1993).
Roger Gard (ed.), Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London, 1968).
David Gervais, Flaubert and Henry James: A Study in Contrasts (London, 1978).
Royal A. Gettman, ‘Henry James’s Revision of The American’, American Literature, 16 (1945), 279–95.
Eric Haralson, ‘James’s The American: A (New) man is Being Beaten’, American Literature, 64 (1992), 475–95.
Michael Hobbs, ‘Reading Newman Reading: Textuality and Possession in The American’, Henry James Review, 12 (1992), 115–25.
Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (Oxford, 1990).
Cornelia Pulsifer Kelley, The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana, Ill., 1930).
Daniel Lerner, ‘The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James’, The Slavonic Year-Book, 20 (Dec. 1941), 28–54.
David McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, Calif., 1996).
Lee Clark Mitchell, ‘A Marriage of Opposites: Oxymorons, Ethics, and James’s The American’, Henry James Review, 19 (1998), 1–16.
Jean Perrot, ‘Un Amour de James’, Revue de littérature comparée, 57 (1983), 275–94.
Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James (New York, 1960).
Constance Rourke, Native American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York, 1931).
John Carlos Rowe, ‘The Politics of the Uncanny in Henry James’s The American’, Henry James Review, 8 (1987), 79–90.
Lewis O. Saum, ‘Henry James’s Christopher Newman: “The American” as Westerner’, Henry James Review, 15 (1994), 1–9.
William T. Stafford, ‘The Ending of James’s The American: A Defense of the Early Version’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 18 (1963), 86–9.
William W. Stowe, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (Princeton, 1983).
Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction (Athens, Ga., 1995).
Patricia Thomson, George Sand and the Victorians: Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1977).
Adeline R. Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1986).
Cheryl B. Torsney, ‘Translation and Transubstantiation in The American’, Henry James Review, 17 (1996), 40–51.
James Tuttleton, ‘Re-Reading The American: A Century Since’, Henry James Review, 1 (1980), 139–53.
William Veeder, Henry James—the Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1975).
Pierre A. Walker, Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (DeKalb, Ill., 1995).
Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville, Va., 1970).
Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette, tr. and ed. Sylvia Raphael, introduction by David Bellos.
—— Père Goriot, tr. and ed. A. J. Krailsheimer.
—— Eugenie Grandet, tr. and ed. Sylvia Raphael, introduction by Christopher Prendergast.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, tr. Gerard Hopkins and ed. Terence Cave.
——A Sentimental Education, tr. and ed. Douglas Parmée.
Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Christopher Butler.
—— The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, ed. Adrian Poole.
—— Daisy Miller and Other Stories, ed. Jean Gooder.
—— The Europeans, ed. Ian Campbell Ross.
—— The Golden Bowl, ed. Virginia Llewellyn Smith.
—— The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Nicola Bradbury.
—— What Maisie Knew, ed. Adrian Poole.
—— The Wings of the Dove, ed. Peter Brooks.
Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, tr. and ed. David Coward.
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, tr. and ed. Richard Freeborn.
—— A Month in the Country, tr. and ed. Richard Freeborn.
Émile Zola, L’Assommoir, tr. Margaret Mauldan, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
—— Nana, tr. and ed. Douglas Parmée.