Henry James Biography

Biography (History of the World: The 19th Century)

ph_0111201229-James.jpg Henry James. Published by Salem Press, Inc.

Article abstract: James is one of the most preeminent and influential writers of the modern novel in America. Both his life and his work are closely related to the United States’ emergence in the twentieth century as a major world power.

Early Life

Henry James was born April 15, 1843, at 21 Washington Place in New York City, son of a wealthy and distinguished American family tracing its roots to an immigrant ancestor, William James. This founder of the James family in America had come from Northern Ireland two generations before, just after the American Revolution, and had made a fortune in real estate in Albany, New York, then a small city greatly influenced by the Dutch. Henry James’s father, Henry James, Sr., married Mary Robertson Walsh, originally from Northern Ireland, and together they produced five children: William, Henry, Garth (known as “Wilky”), Robertson, and Alice. Henry’s brother William James, one year older than he, was to become one of the most famous American philosophers and psychologists.

Henry’s first memory later in life was as an infant on his mother’s knee, viewing the column in the center of the Place Vendôme in Paris, an extraordinarily fitting memory for someone whose attraction for Europe was to be one of the most pronounced aspects of his life. Indeed, the first two years of his life were spent with his family in England and France.

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.

Back in Europe in 1855 with his family, to improve his “sensuous” appreciation, he returned to the United States in 1858, only to leave again in 1859 for a year in Germany and Switzerland. His father, who in adult life became a devotee of the philosophy and theology of the Swedish thinker Emanuel Swedenborg, was dissatisfied with most of the schools available in both the United States and Europe; he continually sought other avenues of cultural enrichment for his children, particularly exposure to British and European society and heritage.

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. In 1864, his family moved to Boston. His friend, William Dean Howells, soon to become an editor at the Atlantic Monthly magazine, was helpful to him, and James published several pieces in the prestigious magazine.

At age twenty-six, he traveled again to England and grew the beard and mustache that would mark his visage until the end of the century. He dined with the eminent art critic and social historian John Ruskin, visited cathedrals, and at last went to Italy, where he formed a permanent impression of how the past impinges on the present, a hallmark of his later writings.

After a brief return to the United States a year later, he spent the years 1872-1873 in Great Britain, Paris, and Rome (which he would revisit in 1874). His residence in Rome during these years gave impetus to the writing of Roderick Hudson (1876), published in the Atlantic Monthly, about an expatriate American sculptor whose life abroad works to destroy him; obviously, James wondered whether Europe’s pull on him would do the same.

The fall of 1875 saw James in Paris, writing The American (1877), the story of an American businessman who is treated very badly in Parisian high society. James himself, though apparently welcomed at this time into exclusive literary and social circles in Paris, never felt fully accepted there. In 1877, at age thirty-four, James went to London, yearning to become fully integrated into English life, breaking down the barriers of being a mere observer and foreigner. He wrote The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in quick succession, the second of which finally established his reputation.

Life’s Work

James returned to the United States in 1881, though now resolved that his mission as a writer was to return to Europe; a notebook entry this same year reads, “My choice is the old world—my choice, my need, my life.” An essay called “The Art of Fiction” (1884), written for Longman’s Magazine, is a kind of literary manifesto inaugurating the “modern” novel, exemplified not only by the works of James but also by those of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. James’s mother died in Boston in 1882 and his father soon thereafter. James went back to London, writing, “It is an anchorage in my life.”

By the end of the 1880’s, he had become a seasoned writer and a true expatriate, ready to enter his last, most mature phase as an artist, abandoning as his main subject the interrelationships of Europe and America and the impact of Europe upon Americans. Henceforward, his novels would have as their more major concern elucidating the inward states of mind in his characters. One already sees some of this new emphasis in Portrait of a Lady, whose main character, Isabel Archer, is married to Gilbert Osmond, an extreme narcissist with the potential for bringing much evil into people’s lives. It is the American expatriates in this novel, not the Europeans, who are the source of most of the deception and intrigue. The work contains portraits of various types of Americans abroad, all drawn with deft skill and subtlety; England, Florence, and Rome form the settings, all brought to life in the kind of convincing detail that only someone intimately familiar with life in these places could accomplish.

The novels of the later 1880’s, The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), and The Tragic Muse (1889), were less successful in many ways. James himself believed that The Bostonians was diffuse and that he had also failed to bring to life people and places in America sufficiently well, because of his having lost touch with the American scene. The Princess Casamassima depicts the poverty of London in the most vivid terms; although it touches upon the most sensitive of political and social issues, this novel is also a good example of one of James’s basic premises at work: that novels are meant to be “pictures,” not “moral or immoral,” not sermons or treatises. Naturally, the work of Charles Dickens was a model here. The Tragic Muse has as its subject the total immersion of the artist into art with all the arduous sacrifice that entails; it undoubtedly reflected James’s own state of mind at the time, since he, too, was poised on the edge of just such a total dedication of the rest of his life.

In 1896, James settled in England, finally moving into Lamb House at Rye, which would be his residence for his last and most intense productive period, the time when the legendary Henry James...

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Henry James Biography (Short Stories for Students)

Henry James, the second son of well-to-do parents, was born in New York City on April 15, 1843. Like his brother William James (the respected...

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Henry James Biography (Masterpieces of American Literature)

James’s fiction, especially his later works, is complex—psychologically, stylistically, and morally. T. S. Eliot once observed that James “had a mind so fine no idea could ever violate it.” While literally untrue—James’s problem was precisely that he had too many ideas and that all of them qualified and altered one another ceaselessly—Eliot’s judgment does suggest something important about James’s writing. Fineness, in the sense of precision, is just what James’s fiction seeks most relentlessly. Reading his work should be proof against any tendency to reach hasty conclusions about human motivation, about human action, and indeed about knowledge itself.

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Henry James Biography (Literary Essentials: Short Fiction Masterpieces)

Henry James’s career is usually divided into four periods: his formative years, his apprenticeship, his middle years, and his major phase. James was descended from Irish Protestants. His grandfather, a poor immigrant, lived out the American Dream and died one of the wealthiest men in the United States. James’s father, Henry James, Sr., renounced the Calvinistic work ethic and indulged in the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg and the socialism of Charles Fourier.

Through most of his youth, James was shuttled back and forth between Europe and the United States, thus gaining an international perspective on art and life. He learned French and received a European education through a variety of tutors and schools. As a...

(The entire section is 425 words.)

Henry James Biography (Survey of Novels and Novellas)

If one wished to create for oneself a background and early life that was appropriate for preparing to be an important and dedicated American novelist during the later years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, one might very well choose just the sort of family and early experience that fate created for Henry James, born in 1843 in New York, New York. The family circumstances were comfortable (his grandfather, William James, had amassed one of the three largest fortunes in New York), and his father, Henry James, Sr.; his mother, Mary Robertson Walsh James; his older brother, William James; and his younger siblings, Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice, were all lively, articulate, and stimulating....

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Henry James Biography (Society and Self, Critical Representations in Literature)

Born to affluent parents who reveled in not putting down roots, Henry James had crossed the Atlantic six times before he was eighteen. His family enjoyed extended stays in Germany, France, Switzerland, and England, returning to the United States in 1860 when the eldest son, William, reached an age that required educational opportunities not available to him abroad. The family took up residence in Newport, Rhode Island, where Henry, exempted from military service in the Civil War because of an injury, spent his time reading voraciously and sketching.

James entered Harvard Law School, but during his first year there realized that he did not want a career in law. He spent most of his time reading in the library or...

(The entire section is 329 words.)

Henry James Biography (Critical Edition of Dramatic Literature)

Henry James, Jr., was the second of five children born to Mary Robertson Walsh and Henry James, Sr. A friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a follower of the Swedish philosopher-theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, Henry James, Sr., advocated a “sensuous” rearing of his children. This amounted to showering his five children with educational opportunities and encouraging them to adopt an individual morality. Although much of the young James’s education occurred at home and through extensive foreign travel (his first trip abroad came when he was five months old and was followed by several more stays during his childhood and adolescence), he also had tutors and attended various schools in the United States and in Europe, including Harvard...

(The entire section is 1218 words.)

Henry James Biography (Great Authors of World Literature, Critical Edition)

Henry James is one of the most important and influential writers in English of the nineteenth century; his examples and his theoretical principles established the foundation of the modernist movement in twentieth century fiction and poetry, and his major novels constitute a great advance in the type known as psychological realism. Henry James’s father was an eccentric though respected philosopher from a prominent New York family. Determined to give his children the best possible education, James, Sr., sent them to the Continent, where they attended schools in France, Germany, England, and Switzerland. The young Henry James returned to America in 1860, studied painting briefly, attended Harvard Law School briefly, and then...

(The entire section is 976 words.)

Henry James Biography (Novels for Students)

Henry James Published by Gale Cengage

Henry James married Mary Robertson Walsh and, on April 15, 1843, the novelist Henry James was born in New...

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Henry James Biography (Novels for Students)

James was born on April 15, 1843, on the edge of Greenwich Village in New York City. Born into a wealthy family, James was exposed to a...

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Henry James Biography (Masterpieces of American Literature)

Henry James, Jr., was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, the son of Henry James, Sr., the Swedenborgian philosopher, and Mary Robertson Walsh. The younger of two sons (his brother was the philosopher and psychologist William James), Henry also had a younger sister, Alice. As is clear from the second volume of his autobiography, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and from letters, Henry, Jr., often struggled in the shadow of his successful elder brother and strove all of his life to carve out an independent career to rival William’s.

Although a New Yorker by birth, James grew up principally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with several important trips to Europe punctuating his youth and early manhood....

(The entire section is 847 words.)

Henry James Biography (Short Stories for Students)

Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, where he lived until his family moved to Boston during his childhood. His father, Henry James,...

(The entire section is 253 words.)