Henry James

Roderick Hudson illustrated Henry James

This is his first full-length novel and executed with such blazing, confident, thirty-one-year-old talent that even if he had produced nothing else, his fame would have been assured. Roderick Hudson, egotistical, beautiful and an exceptionally gifted sculptor, but poor, is taken from New England to Rome by Rowland Mallet, a rich man of fine appreciative sensibilities, who intends to give Roderick the scope to develop his genius. Together they seem like twins or lovers, opposing halves of what should have been an ideal whole. Subtext: blazing unspoken sexuality.