The novel is an uneasy combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe.

Having worked for a living since age 10 (interrupted by service in the Union Army during the American Civil War), he has made a large fortune and retired in his thirties, and is now looking to settle down and get married.

At the Louvre in Paris, he watches a painter named Noémie; he offers to buy the copy she is making and meets her father, M. Nioche.

Noémie tells Newman she has finished none of the work she was to do for him, and in irritation she slashes a large red cross over her painting, obliterating it.

Newman hears town gossip that Noémie has become a courtesan; he goes to see M. Nioche, and finds him drinking in misery.

James originally conceived the novel as a reply to Alexandre Dumas, fils' play L'Étrangère, which presents Americans as crude and disreputable.

While Newman is occasionally too forward or cocksure, his honesty and optimism offer a much more favourable view of America's potential.

He made enormous revisions in the book to try to make all the goings-on more believable, but he was still forced to confess in his preface that The American remained more of a traditional romance rather than a realistic novel.

Most critics have regretted the New York Edition revisions as unfortunate marrings of the novel's original exuberance and charm.

Critics generally concede that the second half of the novel suffers from improbability but still find the book a vivid and attractive example of James's early style.

Always yearning for success in the theatre, James converted The American to a play in the early 1890s for the British actor-manager Edward Compton.