The seventh volume of a projected twelve continues the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that was begun in volume 4. Consisting of some 488 letters, with an additional 510 calendared, it offers a complete accounting of his correspondence for the years 1890-94.

The chief event of the period is the publication of the long-awaited Principles of Psychology, which produced many congratulatory and critical letters from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Christine Ladd Franklin, Shadworth Hollway Santayana, James Mark Baldwin, and others. James devoted much effort to ensuring that Harvard did not fall behind its many emerging rivals in psychology, engineering the coming of Hugo Munsterberg to Harvard and raising funds for the psychological laboratory. Strains and a sense of rivalry began to develop with Granville Stanley Hall, his former student, who was established as president of nearby Clark University. Also of interest are his letters about and to Mary Whiton Calkins concerning her efforts to become a graduate student at Harvard.

James's major essay in ethics, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, " appeared during this period and provoked considerable correspondence. Among the more curious letters is that to Alexander McKenzie, who after visiting James's classroom in an official capacity expressed concern about his lack of Christian faith.

These years saw the birth of James's last child, Alexander Robertson, and the death of his sister Alice. They were also the years of his long European sabbatical.

This fourth volume of a projected twelve begins a new series: William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues. The 309 letters in this volume start when William James was fourteen and on his second trip abroad and conclude when he was thirty-five, negotiating with the president of Johns Hopkins University about a course he had been invited to teach on the relation between mind and body. William James's correspondence in these twenty years deals with everything from his protracted search for a vocation to his recurrent physical and emotional problems. The letters range from his relations with family and friends to his irregular education to his odd - one might say Jamesian - courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens and reveal his developing views on art, morality, politics, women, medicine, philosophy, science, religion, national character, the Civil War, the South, Americans abroad, and other writers and thinkers. They are witness to his growth into adulthood and the price he paid for that growth. William James's teenage letters reveal an adolescent amazingly charming and precocious who displayed from the beginning the promise of his maturity: witty, self-assured, and discerning. His letters simply dance with delight at the world around him. Packed with commentary, much of it considered and trenchant, the letters give us a young William James in the round, brilliantly.