Henry James
The writer Henry James was born into a wealthy
family in New York City in 1843. His father, Henry, Sr., was a
religious free-thinker and follower of the philosopher Swedenborg,
and associated with many of the literary men of his day, including
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Young Henry was
educated privately in New York, Geneva, Paris, and London; the
family lived alternately in Europe and the United States for much
of his childhood.
He began his literary career writing for
magazines. Having dropped out of Harvard Law School to pursue
writing, he associated with the literary set in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and was a good friend of budding novelist and critic
William Dean Howells. In 1864 James’s first published piece of
fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” appeared in the
Continental Monthly. He also wrote reviews and articles for
the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation. He frequently
traveled to Europe and in 1876 settled permanently in London.
James is often cited as one of literature’s great
stylists; it has been said that his writing surrounds a subject and
illuminates it with a flickering light, rather than pinning it
down; according to Virginia Woolf in her diaries, he spoke in the
same way. His style became more and more indirect as he moved from
his early period, when he produced novels that considered the
differences between American and European culture and
character—Roderick Hudson (1876), The American
(1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879),
Washington Square (1881), and The Portrait of a Lady
(1881)—to his middle period, when he wrote two novels about social
reformers and revolutionaries, The Bostonians and The
Princess Casamassima, both in 1886, as well as the novellas The
Aspern Papers (1888) and The Turn of the Screw
(1898).
In 1898 James retreated to Lamb House, a mansion
he had purchased in Rye, England. There he produced the great works
of his final period, in which in complex prose he subtly portrayed
his characters’ inner lives: The Wings of the Dove (1902),
The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).
He returned to the United States for the last time to supervise
production of a twenty-six-volume edition of his most important
fictional works that was published between 1907 and 1917. The
American Scene (1907), an account of his last journey to
America, is highly critical of his native land. He became a British
citizen in 1915. Shortly after receiving the Order of Merit, Henry
James died, on February 28, 1916, leaving behind a prodigious body
of work: twenty completed novels, 112 stories, and twelve plays, as
well as voluminous travel writing and literary journalism and
criticism.