Henry James began to write
Roderick Hudson, the story of a young American sculptor and the patron who takes him to Europe, in Florence in the spring of 1874; as he later recalled, the novel’s earliest chapters were composed in a “high, charming, shabby old room which […] looked out, through the slits of cooling shutters, at the rather dusty but ever-romantic glare of Piazza Santa Maria Novella” (
Henry James: Literary Criticism, pp. 1042–43). The book “was earnestly pursued during a summer partly spent in the Black Forest and (as I had returned to America early in September) during three months passed near Boston” (p. 1041). Still unfinished when it began its year-long serialisation in the
Atlantic Monthlyin January 1875,
Roderick Hudsonwas eventually completed in New York…
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Citation: Chilton, Neil. "Roderick Hudson". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 June 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2335, accessed 02 December 2024.]