This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist tradition of Austen, George Eliot, Flauberty and Balzac, and a decisive step towards the experimental modernism of Woolf and T.S. Eliot. His works often focus upon an innocent American in Europe, and assess the qualities and dangers of both American and European culture at the time, as well as showing their vast differences.

"He was a supreme artist in the intimacies and connections that bind people together or tear them apart," says Leon Edel in his introduction to this collection of Henry James's best letters. Edel has chosen, from the four-volume epistolarium already published, those letters which especially illuminate James's writing, his life, his thoughts and fancies, his literary theories, and his most meaningful friendships. In addition, there are two dozen letters that have never before been printed.

In its unity, its elegance, and its reflection of almost a century of Anglo-American life and letters, this correspondence can well be said to belong to literature as well as to biography. Besides epistles to James's friends and family--including his celebrated brother, William--there are letters to notables such as Flaubert and Daudet in France; Stevenson, Gosse, Wells, and Conrad in England; and Americans from William Dean Howells to Edith Wharton. The latter correspondence, in particular, enlarges our understanding of James's complex involvements with Wharton and her circle; among the previously unpublished letters are several to Wharton's rakish lover, Morton Fullerton.

This masterly selection allows us to observe the precocious adolescent, the twenty-six-year-old setting out for Europe, the perceptive traveler in Switzerland and Italy, and the man-about-London consorting with Leslie Stephen and William Morris, meeting Darwin and Rossetti, hearing Ruskin lecture, visiting George Eliot. The letters describe periods of stress as well as happiness, failure as well as success, loneliness as well as sociability. They portray in considerable psychological depth James's handling of his problems (particularly with his family), and they allow us to see him adjust his mask for each correspondent.

Edmund Wilson has written a new introduction to his classic study of the modern conception of history in the West, and has restored the appendices which appeared in the first edition of 1940 but were dropped from subsequent editions. The book takes its title from the scene of Lenin's arrival from Germany in April 1917, ready to take over the leadership of the Russian Revolution and in doing so bring to a climax the political and intellectual movements which are the subject of this study.

"No one, among American writers, was more contemporary or had a more powerful grasp of American history and American myth," writes Leon Edel of Henry James. This collection of James's essays on American letters, together with some of his miscellaneous writings on other American subjects, is a pivotal document in the reassessment of James as less cloistered--and more American--than previously supposed. James is relaxed and informal as he writes of Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, Godkin, Norton, and Howells: he is fondly recalling--but also criticizing--the cultural orthodoxy in which he was reared. The American Essays remarkably prefigures current efforts to revise and challenge the aesthetic idealism of the Emersonian tradition.

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Unlike her ubiquitous brothers, psychologist and philosopher William and novelist Henry, Jr., Alice James (1848-1892)-the youngest child and only daughter of the wealthy, mercurial, and eccentric New Englander Henry James, Sr.-passed much of her brief lifetime at home, largely isolated from society, unafforded the opportunity to receive extensive formal education or to attain the public success or recognition of her famous siblings. She was, in many ways, a victim of a society that severely circumscribed the lives of women, and that deprived even privileged and talented women like Alice of their intellectual, spiritual, and emotional-as well as physical-freedom. Indeed, James spent many of her years as an invalid, afflicted with a depressive malaise that left her constantly trying to recover a sense of identity and integrity.
Yet, within the pages of the journal she kept during the last four years of her life, Alice James emerges neither as a downtrodden casualty of her era nor as merely an interesting footnote to the illustrious James family saga, but rather as a formidable and triumphant individual in her own right. Far from displaying any wholesale acceptance of the ruling assumptions about her gender-or, for that matter, about anything else-James's diary reveals a vigorously opinionated, intellectually curious, extremely gifted writer renegotiating her position within the discourses of her time.
Long unavailable to students, scholars, and the general reader, this volume reprints Leon Edel's 1964 edition, which is widely accepted as the most faithful reproduction of the original diary. A new introduction by Linda Simon draws extensively on recent scholarship to illuminate James's role both in the context of her family and nineteenth-century culture.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James presents here a revision of his Literary Biography expanded with six further essays illuminating what he calls the New Biography an approach that draws on the resources of psychoanalysis, the biographer s own subjectivity, and the skills of the novelist. Mr. Edel includes a history of the art of biography since Boswell, criticism of some of the best-known biographers, advice for the biographer on documentation and the use of psychological theory, and a discussion of what Edel calls the supreme problem in biography transference, the life-writer s emotional involvement with his or her subject."

"Henry D. Thoreau - American Writers 90 " was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Henry James - American Writers 4 " was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.