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Henry James: Autobiographies

A Small Boy and Others | Notes of a Son and Brother | The Middle Years | other autobiographical writings | Appendix: “Henry James at Work,” by Theodora Bosanquet More

Edited by Philip Horne

“For freshness of voice, firmness of purpose (if a firmness always subject to scruples and second thoughts), and general delight on the page, the memoirs are fully alive to the contemporary reader. . . . James’s memoirs have a shimmer, a charm, and an openhearted immediacy. . . . [They] remind us that sophistication of style and sincerity of purpose are still the best of literary brothers.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

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Video Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and the search for “Americanism”

In 1911, deeply affected by the death of his brother William the year before, Henry James began working on a book about his early life. As was customary for James in his later years, he dictated his recollections to his secretary Theodora Bosanquet, who recalled how “a straight dive into the past brought to the surface treasure after treasure.” A Small Boy and Others (1913) and the two autobiographical books that followed—Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and the posthumously published The Middle Years—stand with James’s later novels as enduring triumphs of his final years. Not only did he create one of the greatest self-portraits in American literature; he also fashioned an indelible account of his renowned family, especially his father, the social philosopher Henry James Sr., his brother William, and his dear cousin Minnie Temple, inspiration for the heroines of two of James’s greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. Collecting these three books and a selection of eight other personal reminiscences (and including as an appendix Bosanquet’s affectionate and insightful memoir “Henry James at Work”), The Library of America’s Autobiographies is the only one-volume edition of James’s autobiographical writings ever published.

Reflecting on his youth, James revisits childhood scenes in Albany and New York City and his erratic education at home and abroad, experiences anew the early delights of attending the theater and looking at art, and recalls meetings with literary and artistic luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, John La Farge, and Charles Dickens. His memories summon the mood and grandeur of nineteenth-century London and Paris and offer a vivid sense of his precocity of feeling; his account of the “hurried disordered time” after his younger brother Wilky was wounded in combat takes the measure of how the Civil War affected him and his family. Threaded through this story of one writer’s beginnings is James’s insistent, searching exploration of the origin of his genius: “What was I thus, within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be but a man of imagination at the active pitch?”

The shorter writings that round out the volume enrich our understanding of James’s consciousness of self and vocation: a lengthy autobiographical sequence written in his notebooks during 1881–82, newly edited for this edition; “The Turning Point of My Life,” which recalls his decision to become a writer while a student at Harvard Law School; a moving 1905 notebook entry about a visit to the family plot at the Cambridge Cemetery; and an essay that offers James’s singular answer to the question “Is There a Life After Death?”

Philip Horne, editor, is Professor of English, University College London. He is the author of Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999) and Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (1990). Founding General Editor of Cambridge University Press’s Complete Fiction of Henry James series, he is currently working on a book on James’s relationship with Theodore Roosevelt.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week Henry James, “Brooksmith”

News Morgan Library exhibition on Henry James beautifully reveals how “the arts are one”

Video Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and the search for “Americanism”

Story of the Week “Henry James at Work,” Theodora Bosanquet

News Rediscovered: The “audacious,” “charming,” “fully alive” late memoirs of Henry James
Table of Contents

A Small Boy and Others

Notes of a Son and Brother

The Middle Years

Other Autobiographical Writings, 1881–1910
From the Notebooks, 1881–82
Wolcott Balestier
Dumas the Younger
The Late James Payn
From the Notebooks, March 29, 1905
An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton
The Turning Point of My Life
Is There a Life After Death?

Appendix: “Henry James at Work” by Theodora Bosanquet

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-471-9 848 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 274 Library of America Series

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