Parisian sketches
Subtitle: letters to the New York tribune, 1875-1876.
By: Edited with an introd. by Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind.
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1957
Place of publication: [New York]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 262
Subjects: Paris (France) -- Description and travel
Other titles: New York tribune.
Description: Henry James's Paris letters to the New York Tribune have been collected in this volume for the first time. They were allowed to linger in the crumbling newspaper files in the hope that they would be forgotten. Extracts from those letters that were devoted to the theater, and certain passages dealing with paintings were incorporated into two compilations highlighting Henry James's art criticism. The majority of the letters, however, remained uncollected, and available only to those who cared to read the files or the microfilm record. James's letters written to the Tribune, may be read not so much for the ephemeral things they chronicled as for the picture they offer us of a sensitive and discriminating American, an American of large imagination, sauntering through the very French scenes to which thousands of his countrymen continue to flock. They can be read equally for their vivid and lively prose; they stem, after all, from the same fertile pen which wrote the novels, the criticism, the autobiographies. The Parisian sketches may be too literary, too reflective, as journalism, but they possess intelligence and suavity, they speak for good manners, refined taste, high civilization. The letters, and the stories which were an outcome of them, raise certain fundamental issues: the function of responsible journalism, the danger to privacy resulting from certain newspaper conditions and the depravity of public taste; the danger James was prophetic of the reporter who, under the banner of "freedom of the press," considers himself free to peep through every keyhole.