Frammenti di un romanzo americano: The Ivory Tower di Henry James

In the summer of 1914 Henry James worked on The Ivory Tower, a novel he left unfinished when the outbreak of World War I made it impossible, in his view, to tell a story about the present. What is left of the novel is a fragment, consisting of three books and one chapter of the fourth book (out of the projected ten books), as well as several pages of notes wherein James sketched the plot, the setting, the delineation of the main characters, the themes he wished to explore, and his narrative strategy. The Ivory Tower was to offer a large-scale portrait of the United States – which James had recently visited after a very long absence – as a country dominated by the power of money, which found expression in rapacious and aggressive masculinity. Within this context, the protagonist of The Ivory Tower, Graham Fielder, was to represent an alternative model of masculinity (one that valued, above all, beauty and kindness) and perhaps a hope for the future of America.