A self-made American businessman comes to Paris to buy the best of everything, including a wife, and discovers that the family he has chosen from cannot be bought at any price. James wrote it in his early thirties, and the ending-which he refused to change to please anybody-is the first time he did the thing he became famous for. Fifty-seven plates of American landscape and street scenes by Albert Bierstadt and George Inness, 1849 to 1909, run alongside the novel as a visual counterpart to its transatlantic clash of new money and old world.
