HENRY JAMES

(1843 - 1916)

Henry James was born in New York City on april 15th 1843. His father wrote about theology and philosophy and his younger brother William James was a famous psychologist and philosopher. From 1845 to 1855, James lived in the United States and was educated by various tutors and schools. During this time, he knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and William Makepeace Thackeray, the first in a long line of renowned writers and artists with whom he associated throughout his life in the United States and Great Britain and on the Continent.  As it turned out, this decade was also to be the longest continuous residence in the United States for James. As a boy, he was shy and a great reader.  Due to the frequent travel of his parents his education was then scattered between his hometown and the European capital cities of Geneva, Paris and London. Having returned to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1860, James was prevented from joining the Union army in the American Civil War, which began in 1861, by a back injury, though his two younger brothers did so. Instead, he went to Harvard Law School in 1862 and began to write and publish stories; he dropped out of law school after one year to pursue his writing career fulltime. He finally settled in Europe in 1875 having given up the intention of a legal career. His novels, however, began to be published at the time of his return to Europe. Roderick Hudson (1876) was the first of these, and in the ensuing twenty years he spent in London he produced many more of his most famous works, often focusing upon the relationship between 'old' Europe and 'young' America. During this time he wrote The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), Washington Square (1881) and Portrait of a Lady (1881) as well as certain travel books.  Although James wrote the famous short-story The Turn of the Screw in 1898, this period one of depression as his writings for the stage were poorly received. Despite these problems, he wrote twelve plays in all. The first years of the twentieth century were far more dignified for the writer who had moved out of London in 1898 to live in Lamb House, Rye. He wrote The Wings of a Dove (1902), now considered his finest work, at this time and followed its success with The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). This later period was a return to James's theme of the contrast between America and Europe is widely regarded as his most effective. His final novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past were unfinished. He became a British subject in 1915. Given his novels' perspective, however, he remains a strangely trans-Atlantic figure very much in the sense that T.S. Eliot is. He was awarded the Order of Merit in January 1916. He died  of pneumonia on 28th Febuary 1916. His ashes were interred at the Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts in the United States. His stone inscribed "Novelist, Citizen of Two Countries, Interpreter of His Generation On Both Sides Of The Sea". A memorial stone was placed for him in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London in 1976.