Henry James

The money came from a grandfather out of County Cavan who reached Albany and became, through banking and real estate, the second-richest man in New York State after John Jacob Astor. His son spent it on ideas and on hauling the children across Europe — London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne, Bonn — retreating to America whenever funds ran low. James studied with tutors, ate through lending libraries, and grew fluent in a French in which he did not stutter, though he stuttered in English. In the autumn of 1861 he injured his back fighting a fire, and the injury kept recurring and kept him out of the Civil War. He tried Harvard Law in 1862, disliked it, and published a theatre review the next year.

He settled in London in 1876 and made the collision of Americans with Europe his subject: Daisy Miller in 1878, The Portrait of a Lady in 1881. Then the market turned. The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima both appeared in 1886 and sold so badly that he told William Dean Howells they had cut the demand for his work to zero. He turned to the theatre instead, and the gallery hissed when he took his bow at the opening of Guy Domville in January 1895. What followed was the late work — The Turn of the Screw in 1898, then The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl inside three years, sentences built to carry two contradictory impressions at once. He then revised 24 volumes of himself for the New York Edition.

Between January 1882 and the end of 1883 he buried his mother, his father, his brother Wilkie and his friend Turgenev. Then Wolcott Balestier in 1891, his sister Alice in 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson in 1894. Woolson fell from a window in Venice and the talk was suicide, and Leon Edel read guilt into the letters afterward and into The Altar of the Dead and The Beast in the Jungle. What James wanted, and from whom, is still argued. He described himself to his brother in 1904 as hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian, and wrote to the sculptor Hendrik Andersen that he held him, dearest boy, in his innermost love. Edel and Saul Rosenzweig took the celibacy literally. Sheldon Novick and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick did not.

He took British citizenship in 1915 and the Order of Merit the year after, and died in Chelsea on February 28, 1916. The record gives no cause. He was cremated at Golders Green, and because his wish to lie in the family plot at Cambridge, Massachusetts, could not legally be granted, his brother's widow smuggled the ashes through customs and buried him there anyway. American critics punished the expatriation for a generation, Van Wyck Brooks loudest among them. Virginia Woolf called the work faintly tinged rose water and H. G. Wells drew him as a hippopotamus after a pea. F. R. Leavis put him at the head of The Great Tradition in 1948, and that verdict has largely held.

Henry James's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Daisy Miller book
  Serialised in 1878. The article's infobox dates the book to 1879. 1878
• Hawthorne book
  A book-length study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and still argued over 1879
• The Portrait of a Lady book
  Leavis called it one of the two most brilliant novels in the language 1881
• The Art of Fiction article
  Against rigid prescriptions on a novelist's subject or method 1884
• The Turn of the Screw book
  Written at Rye and the most analysed ghost story in English 1898
• The Golden Bowl book
  The last of the three novels of his major phase 1904

• April 15, 1843 aged 0 Born at 21 Washington Place in Manhattan
• 1855 aged ~12 The family begins five years of moving between London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne and Bonn They returned to the United States whenever the money ran short.
• 1861 aged ~18 Injures his back fighting a fire and is left unfit for military service
• 1863 aged ~20 Publishes his first piece, a review of a stage performance
• 1876 aged ~33 Settles in London after a year in the Latin Quarter
• January 1894 aged 50 Constance Fenimore Woolson dies in Venice A fall from a window, widely spoken of as suicide. Edel read the shock into the fiction that followed.
• January 5, 1895 aged 51 The gallery hisses him at the opening of Guy Domville The play ran four weeks and was replaced by The Importance of Being Earnest.
• 1915 aged ~72 Becomes a British citizen after 39 years in England The Order of Merit followed in 1916.
• February 28, 1916 aged 72 Dies in Chelsea Cremated at Golders Green. The sourced record gives no cause of death.

• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. brother
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. wrote a book about
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. lifelong friend
• Edith Wharton 1862–1937
  First woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, known for The Age of Innocence and Gilded Age novels. friend and admirer
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. the opposite pole of American fiction
• Willa Cather 1873–1947
  Novelist whose work made immigrant settlement and the Great Plains central subjects of American literature. heir to the method