Henry James, Jr.

William Dean Howells wrote this intimate portrait of his friend Henry James in 1875, when the younger novelist was just beginning the work that would define his career. This is not biography in the modern sense but rather a literary friend's reckoning with a writer still in formation, before The Bostonians, before The Portrait of a Lady, before the great international novels. Howells captures James at a crucial inflection point: the son of a wealthy, philosophically eccentric family,刚刚 beginning to develop the psychological subtlety and interest in character over plot that would become his signature. The essay crackles with the tension between two very different novelists: Howells, the champion of American realism and democratic surfaces, and James, who was already reaching toward something more rarefied, more concerned with the inner life than social types. What makes this piece valuable is not just its historical interest, though it is considerable, but Howells's clear-eyed recognition that his friend was attempting something genuinely new. A literary snapshot from an age when American fiction was still deciding what it wanted to be.