Henry James

Born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, Henry James was the second of five children born to Henry James Sr., a wealthy Swedenborgian theologian, and Mary Robertson Walsh. His elder brother William became America's most famous philosopher and psychologist; his younger sister Alice kept a diary of illness and mordant intelligence that was published after her death. The family was nomadic, crossing the Atlantic repeatedly, living in London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne, and Bonn, and James later said that his education had consisted of "sensuous education" through exposure to European culture. He briefly studied law at Harvard, but by his mid-twenties had committed himself entirely to fiction and criticism. In 1876 he settled permanently in England, first in London, later at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex. The great early novels, The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), dramatize the collision between American innocence and European experience with a subtlety no previous novelist had achieved. The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886) marked a turn toward social realism. The Turn of the Screw (1898), a ghost story of inexhaustible ambiguity, became his most widely read work. The final trilogy, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), represents the summit of his art: novels of such intricate psychological notation that sentences themselves become dramas of consciousness. He wrote twenty novels, one hundred and twelve tales, and twelve plays, in addition to volumes of travel writing and criticism. In 1915, appalled by American neutrality in the First World War, he renounced his citizenship and became a British subject. He died of a stroke in London on February 28, 1916, at seventy-two.

In January 1895, Henry James stood on the stage of the St James's Theatre after the premiere of his play Guy Domville, expecting applause. He had slipped out to watch an Oscar Wilde comedy first, certain of his own triumph. Instead the gallery jeered him, a chorus of boos that ended his hopes for the London stage.