The American Scene
Overview
 
The American Scene is a book of travel writing
Travel writing
Travel writing is a genre that has, as its focus, accounts of real or imaginary places. The genre encompasses a number of styles that may range from the documentary to the evocative, from literary to journalistic, and from the humorous to the serious....

 by Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

 about his trip through the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in 1904-1905. Ten of the fourteen chapters of the book were published in the North American Review
North American Review
The North American Review was the first literary magazine in the United States. Founded in Boston in 1815 by journalist Nathan Hale and others, it was published continuously until 1940, when publication was suspended due to J. H. Smyth, who had purchased the magazine, being unmasked as a Japanese...

, Harper's and the Fortnightly Review
Fortnightly Review
Fortnightly Review was one of the most important and influential magazines in nineteenth-century England. It was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, and six others with an investment of £9,000; the first edition appeared on 15 May 1865...

in 1905 and 1906. The first book publication was in 1907, and there were significant differences between the American and the English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 versions of the book.

Without question the most controversial and critically discussed of James' travel books, The American Scene sharply attacked what James saw as the rampant materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

 and frayed social structure
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

 of turn-of-the-century America.
Quotations

Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they [sky-scrapers] are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself

Ch. 2: New York Revisited, pt. I (p. 77)

The reflecting surfaces, of the ironic, of the epic order, suspended in the New York atmosphere, have yet to show symptoms of shining out, and the monstrous phenomena themselves, meanwhile, strike me as having, with their immense momentum, got the start, got ahead of, in proper parlance, any possibility of poetic, of dramatic capture.

Ch. 2: New York Revisited, pt. I (p. 83)

These adventures of the critical spirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost blush to offer, on this reduced scale, as matter of history; but I draw courage from the remembrance that history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what "happens," but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it.

Ch. 4: New York - Social Notes, pt. IV (p. 182)

It had been intimated to me that one of these scenes of our climax had entered the sophisticated phase, that of sacrificing to a self-consciousness that was to be regretted — that of making eyes, so to speak, at the larger, the up-town public; that pestilent favour of "society" which is fatal to everything it touches and which so quickly leaves the places of its passage unfit for its own use and uninteresting for any other.

Ch. 5: The Bowery and Thereabouts, pt. III (pp. 205-206)

 
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