Henry James was a key figure in the literature of the late 19th century and early 20th century, serving as a vital bridge between literary realism, fin de siècle decadence, and 20th century modernism. A prolific writer, he wrote fiction, travel writing, essays, book reviews, and plays, and is perhaps most well-known for his novel The Portrait of a Lady and the wildly popular horror novella The Turn of the Screw, which was released serially in 1898.
James's father was a religious philosopher, lecturer, and writer, and invested significant time into his children's education. Because of his father's profession, the family traveled to London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Rhode Island over the course of James's childhood, and James became fluent in French under the tutelage of instructors that the family hired abroad. In 1860, the family returned to the United States and settled in New England, where Henry James would remain until 1869.
In 1869, James embarked upon a 14-month trip across Europe, where he met many contemporary British intellectuals and writers of the period, including John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot. After several failed attempts to secure work in Europe, James returned to New York before going back to Europe and settling in London in 1876. In London, James was able to begin writing serialized novels.
Once in Europe, James became increasingly influenced by the literary realists of the 1880s in England and France such as George Eliot, Emile Zola, and Ivan Turgenev. While much of his early work explores Americans in Europe—The American (1877) and Daisy Miller (1878) in particular—later on, James's work moved on to incorporate a variety of different themes. The Portrait of a Lady serves as a study of female agency, and his later serialized novels, like The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, mix Gothic imagery, horror, and modernism. He was also a leading writer for Oscar Wilde's fin de siècle literary magazine The Yellow Book, which published some of the first "modernist" fiction in England and was hailed for its experimentalism.
James is known for straddling the transition between literary movements and for pioneering "transcontinental" literature. Both American and European, modernist and Victorian, and a master of multiple forms, James has proved to be an enduring figure in literary history. There remains a significant debate about James's personal life among biographers, historians, and critics; James never married, and recently many critics have speculated that he was gay, including literary critic Eve Sedgwick and writer Colm Tóibín.
Henry James is a large figure in the development of culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He stood at the origins of modernist literature and techniques of subjective writing which later developed into the well-known “stream of...
The Ambassadors is divided into twelve sections called "books." In 1903, these sections were published, in serial form, in a journal called The North American Review. Later that year, the novel was published as a whole, though there were...
Henry James began writing The American while living in Paris in the winter of 1875-1876. The novel first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in twelve serialized, monthly installments from June 1876 to May 1877. In May 1877, as the serialization...
The Aspern Papers is a novella by Henry James, first published serially in 1888 in The Atlantic Monthly. It was later released as a book in the same year. The novella explores an unnamed literary biographer's quest to obtain letters written...
The Beast in the Jungle’ was written by Henry James in 1903. It was originally published in a volume of short stories, named The Better Sort. James wrote many psychological tales, such as ‘The Turn of the Screw’, however this novella was...
The Bostonians is a satirical novel by American author Henry James initially published serially in The Century Magazine, it was later published in 1886 as a book by Macmillan Publishers. The novel tells a melancholy seriocomedy surrounding Basil...
During Henry James's youth, James came into contact with many of the literary greats of the time due to his family's prominence. When he was a young boy, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited often and he once was introduced to William Thackeray. As he grew...
The Europeans is a satirical short novel by American author Henry James. Initially published serially in The Atlantic Monthly, it was later published as a novel in 1878 by Macmillan Publishers and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The novel is a comedic...
Told from a first person point of view, author Henry James' The Figure in the Carpet was published in 1896 and tells the story of a man (the unnamed narrator, who is a literary critic for a local newspaper), who meets his favorite author and pours...
Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is a historical fiction novel written by American-British author Henry James. The novel explores the politics of marriage including secrets, unsaid grievances, and expectations. It has a film adaptation with the...
The Portrait of a Lady is considered one of Henry James' best works, and it was his first large commercial success. The book was published in serial installments simultaneously in MacMillan's Magazine (in England) and the Atlantic. Up until this...
It was while visiting Europe in in 1874 that Henry James begin writing Roderick Hudson. Even before the manuscript was completed, the Atlantic Monthly began serializing chapters upon the author’s return to American in 1875. With the highly popular...
The Selected Tales of Henry James represent a concerted effort to provide a cross section of the wealth of talent that was the short fiction of Henry James. Speaking of size, there is a good reason why the narratives in this collection are termed...
The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serialized novel in Collier's Weekly. Robert J. Collier, whose father had founded the magazine, had just become editor. At the time, James was already a well-known author, having already...
First serialized in Harper's Magazine in 1880, Washington Square is one of Henry James' most famous (and most accessible) novels. In 1881, Washington Square was published in novel formthe same year that Portrait of a Lady was published. Unlike...
What Maisie Knew is an 1897 novel by American/British author Henry James. The story was first published in The Chap-Book and the New Review, two prominent American literary magazines of the time.
The protagonist of the book is Maisie, a young girl...
Henry James wrote The Wings of the Dove in 1902. It is a novel centered around the life of heiress Milly Theale, and the way in which those around her behave when she becomes seriously ill. It is a study in human motivation, as some of Milly's...
