A great deal of criticism has celebrated Henry James's historical imagination or his lack of it; very little criticism has explored with any precision the sophisticated grasp of history that James exhibits in his novels and the various uses to which he puts his sense of history. Henry James himself had a passion for history and he sought it everywhere. Early in his writing career, in his biography of Hawthorne, James pointed out that ‘it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Much later in his career, in The American Scene, James described his own ‘Hunger for History’ explaining 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 ’. In its underlying form The American is not the kind of novel to compel one to reflect upon the ethos of a civilization or the social history of a culture, certainly not in the ways that Balzac's La Comédie Humaine or Tolstoy's War and Peace does. Nor is it the kind of novel that calls our attention to large historical trends. Yet to grasp the full stringencies of the story one should possess a strong historical awareness; for this novel provides an interesting example of how well James understood the historical implications of his subject.