"My Own Funny Little Lecture Boom": Henry James's American Performance

This essay considers Henry James's American lectures of 1904-1905 in the context of their original performance. James's lecture tour was designed to sell his work to American readers, but his "absolutely economic" considerations were at odds with his increasing desire to intervene directly in American life--to correct, exhort, and excoriate. His final American lecture, "The Question of Our Speech," a scathing (and ironically marketable) critique of American civilization, was informed by James's uneasy negotiation of the public and the private, the commercial and the critical, during his previous lectures in the United States.