Henry James was born in New York City (1843). His first memory was an image of a monument to Napoleon as his family traveled by carriage through Paris, and though he was an American, he always loved Europe and spent most of his life living there.
At some point in his childhood, he was injured, possibly in a fire. He never said much about it to his friends, except that the injury was "horrid," but some scholars have suggested that perhaps he was scarred in some way that would explain why he never had a single love affair with anyone. As far as we know, he died without ever having even received a romantic kiss.
But he wrote almost ten million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880),The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Much dismayed by the United States' determined isolationism in World War he became a British citizen near the end of his life as a show of support for Great Britain. One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."
For a long time, he wasn't very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late '90s.
The one literary art form James never mastered was the play. In his lifetime, plays were a much more popular form of entertainment than novels, and James spent years trying to write a successful play himself.
James finally produced a historical play called Guy Domville (1895), but on opening night, instead of going to his own play, he attended a play by his rival Oscar Wilde. He made it back to his own play just as it had finished, and went out on stage at the curtain call, and the audience booed him off the stage. After that embarrassment, he wrote in his notebook, "I take up my own old pen again—the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles." He gave up on theater after that and devoted his pen to novels.
Henry James wrote, "I'm that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility."
And, "Without [literature], for me, the world would be, indeed, a howling desert."
He spent time in Geneva, London, Paris and Bologna, and his parents let him wander around the streets of the great European cities and soak up their language and culture. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to Europe and wrote for magazines like the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly, which is where his first novel, Watch and Ward was published in 1871.
Around this time he started running out of money, and he had to decide whether he wanted to go back to America, where he had a better chance of getting more books published, or stay in Europe. His brother William wrote to him, "It is a fork in the path of your life, and upon your decision hangs your whole future." Finally, in October 1875, Henry James wrote to his family, "Dear People All. I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!" He would live in Europe for the rest of his life.
He started writing his most famous book, The Portrait of a Lady, in an apartment in Florence overlooking a waterway. It's about a woman named Isabel Archer who goes to England to live with her aunt and uncle and their son Ralph. Isabel inherits some money and goes to Italy, where she decides to marry a rich widower named Gilbert Osmond and spends the rest of the novel dealing with the horrible consequences of her decision. The novel begins, "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."
Henry James started feeling nostalgic for America at the beginning of the twentieth century. He hadn't seen his home country in twenty-five years, and he wanted to know how it had changed since he left. He dreamt about kicking through the leaves on Fifth Avenue and wanted to see if the trees he remembered were still there. He wrote to a friend that he wanted to "lie on the ground, on an American hillside, on the edge of the woods, in the manner of my youth." He had trouble raising the money, but he finally left for America in August 1904. He loved the big open spaces of the American West and the sunny weather in California, but he said the country was "too huge . . . for any human convenience."
James is known for writing big, challenging novels made up of long, complex sentences. He once said, "We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick." And he once called his books "invincibly unsalable." For a long time, he wasn't very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late '90s. James said, "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."
He's considered one of the greatest American writers of his generation, master of the "international novel," but he had an ambivalent attitude toward America throughout his life. He liked what he called the "denser, richer, warmer European spectacle" with its "complexity of manners and types." He said, to his niece, "I hate American simplicity."
In 1875 he moved to Paris, where he met important novelists of the day, including Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev. His early novels, including The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), are about Americans living and traveling abroad. To his sister-in-law, James wrote, "Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried on a stretcher) to die -- but never, never to live." He lived the last two decades of his life in England. He was angry when the United States didn't enter World War I at its start, and so he became a British citizen in 1915. It cost him his reputation in America; he remained unread and out-of-print for years after he died in 1916, until the 30's, when his reputation was resurrected.
Most critics, and James himself, consider his masterpiece to be The Ambassadors (1903). Called by many the "master of the psychological novel," James developed the form of the modern novel's "point of view," which was, as explained by Joseph Beach in The Method of Henry James, "never to allow anything to enter the novel or story which was not represented as a perception or experience of one of the characters." Because of this, James was a major influence on twentieth century writing.
His grandfather was one of the first American millionaires, so James was raised in wealth. His father moved the family back and forth across the Atlantic and engaged tutors for his children. When James was seventeen, the family settled, more or less, in Newport, Rhode Island. He began a brief period of study at Harvard Law School, but he soon decided he wanted to be a writer. He moved to Europe in his early thirties, at first living in Paris, where he was close to Ivan Turgenev and Flaubert; then he moved to London and began writing about the contrast between America and Europe.
Source: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac
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