Henry James
1843–1916 · United States and England
the American who wrote Europe from the inside
James grew up between continents — a restless father moved the family repeatedly between America and Europe — and made that displacement his subject: Americans meeting an older, subtler, more compromised world and being changed or destroyed by it. He settled permanently in England in 1876.
He wrote twenty novels and more than a hundred stories, and made the novel's centre the inside of a mind rather than the sequence of events. In 1895 he tried the theatre, and the first night of Guy Domville ended with the author pushed out to face an audience that booed him. He went back to fiction humiliated, and produced the three late novels usually counted his greatest — dictating them aloud to a typist, which is audible in the long, qualifying, endlessly precise sentences of his last manner.
In 1915, angered by American neutrality while Britain was at war, he became a British subject; he was given the Order of Merit shortly before his death the following year. He never married, and the great subject of his private life, so far as anyone can responsibly say, was the intensity of attachments he did not act on.