Long before the so-called "lost generation" of 20th-century American writers in Paris unleashed their profound yet homesick talents on the world, two giants of 19th-century American letters had long since charted expatriate territory in body and soul.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James are the subjects of Cornell University professor and author Dan McCall's latest work of literary criticism, Citizens of Somewhere Else (Cornell University Press). The title is taken from Hawthorne's preface to The Scarlet Letter, a book written in the 1840s, in the language of the 1640s, making Hawthorne an "expatriate in time as well as space," McCall says. In the preface, Hawthorne proclaims, "I am a citizen of somewhere else; I dwell in the realm of quiet."

"That this man who is so quintessentially American -- he was born on the 4th of July -- would say he's a citizen of somewhere else is very interesting because he's our first great short story writer to make his material American," McCall says. James, on the other hand, he adds, "who lived his mature life all over the continent and in England, and really is a citizen of somewhere else, can't stop writing about Americans."

Hawthorne and James were not contemporaries, but McCall bridges that generation gap with personal insights about the authors' obsessions with America. The result is a very readable, fresh exploration of the relationship these seminal American writers had to each other, to their world and to their art. More than a knowledgeable and sensitive guide, the book offers keen observations about reading in general and the way literature is taught in colleges and universities today.

Publisher's Weekly calls Citizens of Somewhere Else "a splendid new book" that provides a "salutary balance between traditional and innovative approaches to literature."

McCall, a professor of American studies and English at Cornell for 30 years, is the author of seven novels, including Jack the Bear, which was made into a major Hollywood movie, and Triphammer. He also is the author of critical studies on Richard Wright and Herman Melville.