Henry James

A Little Tour in France is a book of travel writing by American writer Henry James. Originally published under the title En Province in 1883–1884 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, the book recounts a six-week tour James made of many provincial towns in France, including Tours, Bourges, Nantes, Toulouse, Arles and several others. The first book publication was in 1884. A second, extensively revised edition was published in 1900. Henry James gives...

The Beast in the Jungle is one of James' finest short novels touching upon such universal themes as loneliness, fate, love and death. The story can be interpreted as a confession or parable about James' own life. He never married and possibly never experienced a consummated sexual relationship. Although he did enjoy a thorough experience of aesthetic creativity, it is possible that he still regretted what he called the essential loneliness of his...

HE thought he had already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fullness the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude, quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new literary star that had begun to hang, with a fresh red light, over the vast, even though rather confused, Anglo-Saxon horizon; positively approaching that celebrity with a...

The Sacred Fount is a novel by Henry James, first published in 1901. This strange, often baffling book concerns an unnamed narrator who attempts to discover the truth about the love lives of his fellow guests at a weekend party in the English countryside. He spurns the "detective and keyhole" methods as ignoble, and instead tries to decipher these relationships purely from the behavior and appearance of each guest. He expends huge resources of energy...

Henry James considered "the beautiful and blest nouvelle" to be "the ideal form" for fiction, and to this genre he brought the full perfection of his imaginative artistry. The themes he chose and the values he set forth in the six nouvelles that comprise this Signet Classic typify the depth and power of his craftmanship - the unique perception of a writer who unerringly deciphers the mind of a gay and flirtatious American girl adrift among the sophisticates...

I have gathered into this volume several short fictions of the type I have already found it convenient to refer to as "international"-though I freely recognise, before the array of my productions, of whatever length and whatever brevity, the general applicability of that term.

"The Turn of the Screw," one of Henry James's most popular novellas, is an intense psychological tale of terror. In an old house on Christmas Eve a Governess comes to live with and take care of two young children. The Governess loves her new position in charge of the children, however she is soon disturbed when she begins to see ghosts. This classic story is included in this volume with the three other following tales: "The Friends of the Friends,"...

Five novels dramatize the interaction of Americans with more sophisticated Europeans.