Book Description
In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of the Gilded Age. Set among the great houses and sweeping sea views of Newport, Rhode Island, with the backroom deals and enduring animosities of New York's financial world lurking in the background, The Ivory Tower explores the predicaments of Rosanna Gaw and Graham Felder, heirs to two rival tycoons. The good intentions of these fine young people make them the perfect instruments through which their benefactors can pursue their own ambitions, even from beyond the grave. When James died in 1916, he had completed the first three books of The Ivory Tower.
Ivory Tower FROM THE PUBLISHER
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 The Ivory Tower, 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." James died in 1916 with the first three books of The Ivory Tower 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.
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