James was a fine travel writer, and in his late period continued writing about Italy and France, but in 1907 published The American Scene, which he liked to think of as the best of its genre. The European essays addressed the uninformed, but the American book is for the travelled and the untravelled. He had written about America before, essays on Saratoga and Newport in 1870, and Niagara in 1871, but these are occasional pieces. His writings on France and Italy, though working well as books, were collections of journalistic essays, but the new book was conceived as a new genre of traveller's autobiography. It belongs to a small subgenre, the narrative of nostos, the return journey. It records marked social and demographic changes, becoming history as well as geography and topography. It is a blend of memoir with travel-essay, though as memoir it is reticent, cutting out the names of friends, companions, and hosts. It is a tribute to James's physical energy and alertness as a traveller at 61. It is one of his unfinished books, as he projected a sequel which was never written, for which notes survive. It has had interesting editors, including W. H. Auden. It has been criticized for political incorrectness, chiefly in the descriptions and anecdotes of Jews and blacks.

Auden says James is not a journalist but an artist, for whom travel is the most difficult subject because it deprives him of ‘freedom to invent’, that ‘successfully to extract importance from historical personal events without ever departing from them, free only to select and never to modify or to add, calls for imagination of a very high order’. Perhaps Auden exaggerates inventiveness as a novelist's gift not shared by the poet. In the Italian essays, for instance, mostly written in the 1870s but collected in 1901 as Italian Hours, James is happy not to invent but to criticize and appreciate, and offers fine discriminated response to Italian art, Venetian and Florentine painting in particular, and sensuous descriptions of landscape and architecture. In language he is always inventive, his impressions made amusing and personal.