![]() Henry moved throughout his childhood, as the young cosmopolite studied in Geneva, Paris, and Bonn, among other cities. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a leading theologian of the time and friends with Emerson and Thoreau his older brother, William, would become an important figure in psychology and philosophy and his sister, Alice, would later become famous as a diarist. James was born on Apin New York City into a family of wealth and intellect. In his preface to The Golden Bowl, James wrote that the writing and reading of fiction was an ethical project, that “the effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.” Moving from the Victorian melodrama of The American (1877) to the modernist impressionism of The Wings of the Dove ( 1902), James’s entire career was defined by the seriousness with which he took the art of the novel. ![]() ![]() His works explored the encounter between Americans and Europeans, between the innocent and the worldly, between individual, fluid consciousness and the obtuseness of others and the outside world. ![]() A master of focalization, he showed in works like What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Golden Bowl (1904) the centrality of perspective to a novel’s construction. Henry James was a fierce defender of the novelistic tradition and of formal complexity. ![]()
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