Henry James (1843-1916) is one of America's premier writers of fiction. His famous novella "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), concerning the governess of two small children who thinks that her charges are being haunted by ghosts, brilliantly illustrates James' theory of the horror story: to suggest rather than state horror. A true psychological thriller as well as an acute study of obsession, "The Turn of the Screw" leaves open whether the children are being 'corrupted' by malevolent spirits or by their neurotic governess.
HENRY JAMES was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, into a wealthy, sophisticated family. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a noted Swedenborgian philosopher and social theorist, and the younger brother of the psychologist and philosopher William James. The Jameses, avid theater-goers and book readers, traveled frequently abroad. James attended a number of schools and also had private tutors; but his greatest education came from his voracious reading, especially of novels, and his solitary walks in European cities where he observed the people around him. This solitariness was intensified when in 1861 the eighteen-year-old James injured his back while helping to put out a fire, which made him ineligible to enlist as a soldier with the North in the Civil War. Thereafter James - who would refer to this injury as a "horrid even if obscure hurt" - became more a detached observer of life than an active participant in it. It was at this time that James, having entered - and quickly left - Harvard Law School, began writing. His first signed piece, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1865, was soon followed by other stories depicting American manners and relationships, book reviews, art criticism, and his early novels Watch and Ward (1870) and Roderick Hudson (1875). As a young man, James made several independent trips abroad; from 1875 to the end of his life he lived on the Continent and in England, with infrequent returns to the United States. His novella Daisy Miller (1878), about a naive young American woman confronting the foreign conventions of Europe, brought James his first major critical attention; but it was the novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) that established James's literary reputation. During his career James published twenty full-length novels, a dozen novellas, and over a hundred tales, as well as plays, essays, criticism, travel literature, and biography. A theme running through James's fiction is the "clash" between Europe and America, i.e., American vitality and innocence along with its naivete and mistrust of art, beauty, and sensuality; and European sophistication but with that its amorality, cynicism, and deviousness. James's style of writing, described as cerebral and reflecting his own aloofness, features contemplation over action; his later novels are told through the eyes of an engaged, articulate observer who relates to the reader what he perceives. Appearances are often deceiving, however, and the reader must follow the workings of the protagonist's mind as he struggles to discover, in his interaction both with other characters and with his surroundings, the underlying truth. James's dramatization of thought deeply altered the development of the novel as an art form and profoundly influenced Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, among others. Shortly before his death, James became a British subject to protest U.S. neutrality in the first years of World War I. He died in London on February 28, 1916. Henry James's other published works include French Poets and Novelists (1878), The Europeans (1878), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove ( 1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl ( 1904), and The American Scene (1907).
