Henry James

Henry James was an American novelist who settled in Europe and made the collision between the two continents his lifelong subject. Born in New York to a wealthy and intellectually restless family, educated in Geneva, London, Paris and Bonn, he belonged fully to neither side of the Atlantic and turned that homelessness into a method. His novels are studies in consciousness: what a person notices, what they decline to notice, and the price of the difference. The early books are bright and social; the late ones, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, are among the most demanding and most rewarding sentences in English, built to reproduce the actual motion of a mind arriving at understanding too late. He wrote more than twenty novels, over a hundred stories, plays, criticism and travel writing, and became a British subject in 1915 in protest at American neutrality.