Letters from America

In May 1913, Rupert Brooke embarked on a year-long expedition of North America, visiting the United States, Canada, and finally the South Seas. He sent his impressions home in a series of letters, written for publication in the Westminster Gazette, describing all his various experiences and reflections: the beauty of arriving by boat at night in New York; the novelties of a baseball game; the awesome grandeur of Niagara Falls and the Canadian wilderness; and "the full deliciousness of traveling in an American train by night through new scenery." He is blunt in his judgments on society, business, and cities; playful in his accounts of Anglo-American relations; and finally humbled by the vastness of the landscape in which he finds himself. Henry James's foreword to the collection on its publication in 1916 is included here as an afterword.