This is a study of the effect of their travels in Italy on thirteen American writers, among them Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W. D. Howells, and Henry James. Dr. Wright's thesis is that Italy was a major influence on the American writers of fiction who visited that country.

Nathalia Wright was Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The Inner Room, Melville's Use of the Bible, and Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor, the last also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.