Henry James Biography

American-born writer, gifted with talents in literature, psychology, and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of literary criticism. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne.

Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr, was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne. His Irish grandfather had provided the wealth that endowed his heirs with the privileges of comfort and social affluence. James made little money from his novels. Once his friend, the writer Edith Wharton, secretly arranged him a royal advance of $8,000 for THE IVORY TOWER (1917), but the money actually came from Wharton's royalty account with the publisher. When Wharton sent him a letter bemoaning her unhappy marriage, James replied: "Keep making the movements of life."

In his youth James traveled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn At the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law. James published his first short story, 'A Tragedy of Errors' two years later, and devoted himself to literature. In 1866-69 and 1871-72 he was contributor to the Nation and Atlantic Monthly.

From an early age James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature and Russian classics in translation. His first novel, WATCH AND WARD (1871), was written while he was traveling through Venice and Paris. It tells a story of a bachelor who adopts a twelve-year-old girl and then plans to marry her.

After living in Paris, where James was contributor to the New York Tribune, he moved to England, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex. During his first years in Europe James wrote novels that portrayed Americans living abroad. In 1905 James visited America for the first time in twenty-five year, and wrote 'Jolly Corner'. It was based on his observations of New York, but also a nightmare of a man, who is haunted by a doppelgänger.

Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and novels for the New York edition of his complete works. His autobiography, A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS, appeared in 1913 and was continued in NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER (1914). The third volume, THE MIDDLE YEARS, appeared posthumously in 1917. The outbreak of World War I was a shock for James and in 1915 he became a British citizen as a loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against the US's refusal to enter the war. James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915. He expected to die and exclaimed: "So this is it at last, the distinguished thing!" James died three months later in Rye on February 28, 1916.

Characteristic for James novels are understanding and sensitively drawn lady portraits. His main themes were the innocence of the New World in conflict with corruption and wisdom of the Old. Among his masterpieces is DAISY MILLER (1879), where the young and innocent American Daisy finds her values in conflict with European sophistication. In THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881) again a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe. THE BOSTONIANS (1886) was based on Alphonse Daudet's novel L'Évangéliste and set in the era of the rising feminist movement. WHAT MAISIE KNEW (1897) depicted a preadolescent young girl, who must chose between her parents and a motherly old governess. In THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (1902) a heritage destroys the love of a young couple. James considered THE AMBASSADORS (1903) his most 'perfect' work of art. The novel depicts Lambert Strether's attempts to persuade Mrs Newsome' son Chad to return from Paris back to the United States. Strether's possibility to marry Mrs Newsome is dropped and he remains content in his role as a widower and observer. James's most famous short stories include 'The Turn of the Screw', a ghost story in which the question of childhood corruption obsesses a governess.

Although James is best-known for his novels, his essays are now attracting audience outside scholarly connoisseurs. In his early critics James considered British and American novels dull and formless and French fiction 'intolerably unclean'. "M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value." (from The Art of Fiction) In PARTIAL PORTRAITS (1888) James paid tribute to his elders, and Emerson, George Eliot, Turgenev. His advice to aspiring writers avoided all theorizing: 'Oh, do something from your point of view'. H.G. Wells used James as the model for George Boon in his Boon (1915). When the protagonist argued that novels should be used for propaganda, not art, James wrote to Wells: "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretense of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, Henry James."