Autor: Professor Philip Horne

Henry James was born in New York in 1843 into a wealthy, eccentric, brilliant family. In his youth he travelled between Europe and America, studying in London, Paris, Geneva, Newport, Rhode Island and Bonn. He half-heartedly studied law at Harvard, which only confirmed his sense of his vocation: to read and write fiction.His first novel, Watch and Ward, appeared in 1871 in The Atlantic Monthly. In 1875 James moved to Europe: Paris, then London, and later Rye in Sussex. Apart from his twenty completed novels and 112 short stories, James wrote plays, criticism, travel books, autobiographies – and a huge number of letters. He became a British citizen in 1915 and died in 1916.