Travels with Henry James

"Henry James preempted me by a century or so. When I started Conde Nast Traveler in 1986, the ambition was to bring truth to travel, contraband in those days of souped-up public relations and freebies, but relieve the rawness of our independent criticism with the literary graces of such as Robert Hughes, Pico Iyer, Christopher Buckley, Edmund White, Simon Winchester. Well, Henry James made the felicitous combination of honesty and literature before I was born, and this little book is a joy I wish I'd read before. It's small enough to slip into a side pocket. Travel with Henry James. You will never be bored!"
–Harold Evans, Conde Nast Traveler

"This is a fascinating collection of reports from travels in England, Europe and the United States, as the young Henry James finds his voice. In this pages he discovers the tone which will become his hallmark as a writer of fiction, a tone which is both precise and leisurely, filled with shapely sentences, and also witty and sharp and perceptive"
–Colm Toibin

"No writer in history was a better describer than James, and nobody could get more mileage from a word like 'physiognomically.' These essays, full of the sweet enthusiasm of the great man's youth, offer vista after vista and delight after delight."
–Ian Frazier