Henry James

James, Henry

(1843–1916) writer, critic; born in New York City (brother of Alice and William James). Son of the wealthy amateur philosopher, Henry James Sr., he was educated by private tutors until 1855; the family spent most of the years 1855–60 traveling in Europe, where Henry continued his education, then settled in Newport, R.I. (1860–62) where he apparently suffered an unspecified injury in a stable fire. He attended Harvard Law School (1862–63), then withdrew to devote himself to writing. Starting in the mid-1860s his essays and critical reviews began appearing in The North American Review, while his first novel, Watch and Ward, was published in Atlantic Monthly (1871). He divided his time between Cambridge, Mass., and Europe (1869; 1872–74; 1875); in Paris in 1875 he came to know Turgenev and Flaubert among other European writers. In 1876 he settled in England, where he would spend most of the rest of his life, chiefly in London and in Rye, Sussex; he never married but he was a sociable man, often in the company of other writers such as Edith Wharton. He traveled frequently on the Continent, and published several notable travel books between 1875 and 1909. His first novels—of the so-called international period, dealing as they do with interactions between Americans and Europeans—include The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The works of his second period stressed psychological and social relationships and include Washington Square (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Sacred Fount (1901). During the 1890s he also wrote plays but he never found much success in the theater. He continued his examination of intricate psychological realities in works of his final period that include his three masterworks, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1904–05 he visited the U.S.A. where he traveled, lectured, and arranged for the New York Edition of his works (1907–09), for which he made numerous revisions. His account of his visit, The American Scene (1907), was not always appreciative of his homeland; he returned to the U.S.A. in 1910–11. In 1915 he became an English citizen to show his solidarity with Britain during World War I and he became involved in war relief and the American volunteer ambulance corps. Soon thereafter he suffered several strokes, and he died shortly after receiving Britain's Order of Merit. He had been writing almost to the end, and in his long career, in addition to his many novels and travel books, he had written many classic short novels ("The Turn of the Screw," 1898), short stories ("The Beast in the Jungle," 1903) and critical essays ("The Art of Fiction," 1885) as well as two memoirs. His intricate and complex sentence structure and delicately nuanced perceptions have never appealed to all readers but ultimately they became the models for one "school" of modern fiction and James has become recognized as one of the supreme writers of all time.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

James, Henry

 

Born Apr. 15, 1843, in New York; died Feb. 28, 1916, in London. American writer.

In the novel Roderick Hudson (1876) James described how the talent of a sculptor, misunderstood by bourgeois society, was destroyed. The blasted hopes of women in love who are deceived by predatory scoundrels are dealt with in the novels Washington Square (1881; Russian translation, 1881) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The novel The American (1877; Russian translation, 1880) departs from realism. Its hero, the millionaire Newman, is portrayed as the embodiment of selflessness. The novel The Bostonians (1886) ridicules the democratic traditions of American reformers and Utopians, and Princess Casamassima (1886) caricatures the revolutionary movement in Europe.

In the novel The Tragic Muse (1890), James juxtaposed art and public life. He cultivated a refined psychologism in the novels The Sacred Fount (1901), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Of his later works, the short stories and novellas about the tragic fate of the artist in the world of property owners are the best (“The Aspern Papers,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Figure in the Carpet”).

WORKS

The Complete Tales, vols. 1-12. London, 1962-64.
In Russian translation:
“Dezi Miller.” In the collection Amerikanskaia novella, vol. 1. Moscow, 1958.

REFERENCES

Edgar, P. Henry James, Man and Author. New York, 1964.
Henry James. Edited by T. Tanner. [London, 1968.] (Bibliography, pp. 341-43).
Powers, L. H. H. James. New York, 1970.

A. A. ELISTRATOVA

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.