Henry James. Biography and complete works

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Author: James, Henry

Date and Place of birth:
b. April 15, 1843, New York, USA
d. February 28, 1916, Rye, Sussex, UK

Life and Works:

American novelist and critic. A master of the psychological novel, Henry James was an innovator in technique and one of the most distinctive prose stylists in English.

Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy, intellectually inclined family. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a Swedenborgian theologian and one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne, and the brother of William James, the philosopher.

In his youth James traveled with his family back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, and Bonn and entered Harvard law school in 1862, but he much preferred reading and writing fiction to studying law.

From an early age James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature, and Russian classics in translation.

Encouraged by William Dean Howells and other members of the Cambridge literary circle in the 1860s, James wrote critical articles and reviews for the Atlantic Monthly, a periodical in which several of his novels later appeared in serial form. He made several trips to Europe, and while there he became associated with such notable literary figures as Turgenev and Flaubert.

In 1876 he settled permanently in London. The outbreak of World War I was a profound shock for James. In 1915 he became a British citizen to declare his loyalty to his adopted country and to protest the US's refusal to enter the war on behalf of Britain. He revisited America on several occasions, most notably in 1904-1905.

In all he wrote 22 novels, including two left unfinished at his death, and 112 tales of varying lengths, along with many plays and a very large number of nonfiction essays and books. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne. James once said that he learned more of the craft of writing from Balzac "than from anyone else".

Henry James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from different worlds—the Old World (Europe), simultaneously artistic, corrupting, and alluring; and the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive—and explore how this clash of personalities and cultures affects the two worlds.

His earlier work is considered Realist, but in fact throughout his long career he maintained a strong interest in a variety of artistic effects and movements.

James's middle to late prose style is frequently marked by long, digressive sentences and highly descriptive passages that defer the verb for a longer space than is usual. James's style seems to change during his career from a straightforward style early on to a more languid style later, and biographers have noted that the change of style occurred at approximately the time that James began employing an amanuensis.

Henry James was afflicted with a mild stutter. He overcame this by cultivating the habit of speaking very slowly and deliberately. Since he believed that good writing should resemble the conversation of an intelligent man, the process of dictating his works may, perhaps, account for a shift in style from direct to conversational sentences.

He made only a modest living from his books, yet was often the houseguest of the wealthy. While not really one of them, James had grown up in a wealthy family and was able to observe them at close range and to sympathize with their problems.

James published his first short story, A Tragedy of Error, anonymously in 1864 and from then on devoted himself completely to literature and travel, gradually assuming the role of detached spectator and analyst of life.

His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), appeared first serially in the Atlantic. James wrote it while he was traveling through Venice and Paris. Watch and Ward tells a story of a bachelor who adopts a twelve-year-old girl and plans to marry her.

In his early novels, including Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), as well as some of his later work, James contrasts the sophisticated, though somewhat staid, Europeans with the innocent, eager, though often brash, Americans. In the novels of his middle period, The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), and The Tragic Muse (1890), he turned his attention from the international theme to reformers, revolutionaries, and political aspirants.

The Bostonians, set in the era of the rising feminist movement, was based on Alphonse Daudet's novel L'Évangéliste.

During and after an unsuccessful six-year attempt (1889–95) to win recognition as a playwright, James wrote a series of short, powerful novels, including The Aspern Papers (1888), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Sacred Fount (1901). In his last and perhaps his greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), all marked by a return to the international theme, James reached his highest development in the portrayal of the intricate subtleties of character and in the use of a complex, convoluted style to express delicate nuances of thought.

Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and novels for the so-called New York Edition of his complete works. It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons. His autobiography, A small boy and others (1913) was continued in Notes of a son and brother (1914). The third volume, The middle years, appeared posthumously in 1917.

Perhaps more than any previous writer, James refined the technique of narrating a novel from the point of view of a character, thereby laying the foundations of modern stream of consciousness fiction. The series of critical prefaces he wrote for the reissue of his novels (beginning in 1907) won him a reputation as a superb technician. He is also famous for his finely wrought short stories, including The Beast in the Jungle and The Real Thing, which are masterpieces of the genre.

Although James is best-known for his novels, his essays are now attracting audience outside scholarly connoisseurs. In Partial portraits (1888) James paid tribute to his elders, and Emerson, George Eliot, and Turgenev.

Henry James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915. He died three months later on February 28, 1916 in London.

Two novels, The Ivory Tower and The sense of the past (1917), were left unfinished at his death.

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