James found the figure of "the American Girl" congenial to many of his important themes and refined and extended his depiction of her in Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902), and Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl (1904). The international theme developed in these works also figures prominently in Roderick Hudson (1875) which is about a young sculptor who visits Rome and risks wasting his talent, in The American (1877) which tells the story of a wealthy American businessman who goes to Paris in search of culture and falls in love with an aristocratic woman whose family thwarts their romance and in The Europeans (1878) where the situation is reversed and two Americans born and raised in Europe return to their New England relatives.