William James is impatient with his brother's "perverse" and "unheard-of method" of writing, whose difficulty and indirection require too much from readers in "this crowded and hurried reading age." As an "account of America," it is "supremely great," but it is "largely one of its omissions, silences, vacancies." It consequently produces "the illusion of a solid object, made (like the 'ghost' at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space." The overall effect, according to William James, "is but perfume and simulacrum" (2:277–278, passim).
The informal review that James's brother William James (1842–1910) wrote in a letter to him on indicates why, yet it also suggests the reason that The American Scene would later command so much interest. At the time of its initial publication in 1907 (which followed the serialization of many sections in Harper's Monthly Magazine, the North American Review, and the Fortnightly Review), the book's reception was rather tepid.
At once impressionistic autobiography and documentary travelogue, personal reminiscence of his native land and cultural critique of American modernity, The American Scene's idiosyncratic hybridity has led contemporary critics to consider it one of Henry James's (1843–1916) most important works.
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