James' literary career has been divided into three stages or 'periods': the early period, the middle years, and the 'later manner' or, more popularly, the major phase. encountered as we turn back and forth between the distinctively American and the distinctively European outlook.' This contrast forms the basis of the Jamesian 'international theme.'

James saw, in his own words, the manifest 'possibility of contrast in the human lot. In Europe, James could best deal with his dominant theme: the illumination of the present by 'the sense of the past,' the American present illuminated by the sense of the European past. He returned to America in 1870, went abroad again in 1872 for two more years, spent the winter of 1874-75 in New York, and finally left America in 1875, this time for good. and assimilate' in 1869, at the age of twenty-six, he traveled again to Europe, entered the mainstream of London intellectual life, and formed friendships with leading literary figures of the time. As a young man, James sensed the freedom of Americans to 'deal freely with forms of civilization not our own. The influence of James' European experience and, ultimately, the 'idea' of Europe as it relates to his work are central to an understanding of James' fiction. He became a British subject in 1915, a year before his death. At the age of thirty-three, he took up residence in Europe, living first for a year in Paris and then permanently in England.

His father, Henry James, Sr., moved among a wide circle of intellectual leaders of the time and exposed his children to the cultural advantages of New England and, more especially, Europe before he reached his eighteenth birthday, the younger James had lived abroad for extended periods on three separate occasions.Īn 'obscure hurt' suffered in 1861, an injury to his spine, kept James from service in the Civil War for reasons perhaps related to this injury, James never married. Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, into an affluent and socially prominent family. During the fifty years of his literary career, which spanned the period from the end of the American Civil War to the beginning of World War I, James produced a body of tales and novels that fills thirty-six volumes and an almost equal number of volumes of non-fiction prose, including travel books, autobiography, books of criticism, letters, and literary notebooks.

Honored as one of the greatest artists of the novel, he is also regarded as one of America's most influential critics and literary theorists. Henry James has been called the first of the great psychological realists in our time.

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