Roderick Hudson (The Novels and Stories of Henry James, Vol. 1)

xxvii, 462, [3] 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.