Roderick Hudson (The New York Edition of Henry James) by James, Henry - 1971

New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971. Reissue. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 0x0x0. Reissue. Lacks jacket. Top page ridge foxed. 1971 Hard Cover. xix, 526 pp. Author's third book, his first novel, with note by Percy Hubbock and preface by author. Originally published in 1875 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, "Roderick Hudson" is a bildungsroman that traces the development of the title character, a sculptor. "Roderick Hudson" is James's first important novel. The theme of Americans in Europe, so important in much of James's work, is already central to the story. Hudson is a young law student in Northampton, Massachusetts, who shows such surprising ability as a sculptor that the rich Rowland Mallett, visiting a cousin in Northampton, decides to stake him to several years of study in Rome, then a center of expatriate American society. The story has to do not only with Roderick's growth as an artist and the problems it brings, but also as a man susceptible to his new environment, and indeed his occasional rivalries with his American friend and patron.