Henry James Research Paper

Henry James was born on April 15, 1843 in New York City, New York. He was a British writer in the nineteenth century. His parents were Henry James Sr. and Mary James. His brother was William James and his sister was the diarist, Alice James. He attended Law School at Harvard but left after one term in 1863. He found that his calling was a writing career, though he was not certain if writing would keep him from depending on his family financially. Henry James was a very intelligent man despite the fact that he was viewed differently from others.
There are events in Henry James’ life that we think may have influenced him in his work. He often released his emotions in his works as well. “A Small Boy was written at a period of breakdown, artistic reversal, and family deaths, so that he valued I as a therapeutic retreat to a past whose pleasures might off set his emotional depression.” (Mitchell 6) Henry James took the advantage that he was going through some grey areas to help create some great work like A Small Boy. He looked for

comfort in many of his stories and used them to help keep himself occupied and not think about the many issues he was confronted with throughout his lifetime. “Henry James was prolific storyteller who supported himself by his writing.” (Young 1) Barbara Young explains that “In reading the novels in chronological order, it is possible to follow the events in both his exterior and interior life from the age of 23 to his unfinished autobiographical studies in his seventeenth year.” (Young 3)
Henry James always expressed his thoughts and feelings through his work.

It seems to have been the best way to take thing off of his chest. “James’s desire simply to talk, and to do so only of his own consciousness, offers a peculiarly self-centered, even slightly narcissistic vision of the artist himself, at odds with so many of his fictional characters.’ (Mitchell 6) James described the life he lived through his characters. Lee Mitchell explains that “James buries his own self-consciousness as an artist recreating the past in the consciousness of his younger avatar, as if to escape from that his history will soon produce.” (Mitchell 7) Henry James went through a really tough time when his brother, William, passed away. He looked towards his work to rely on and get him through this grey area. “… James seems simply to release, or license, his memory to plumb his past and toss up shards of various distinctive experiences.” (Mitchell

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Many people viewed Henry James as a very intelligent man and also very different from others. “The filmmakers have approached the material intelligently, streamlining James’s complicated plot the better to reveal its elegant bones and brilliant central conceit, as sketched out here by James himself in the Art of the Novel.” (Allen 3) Henry James had a different way of viewing everyday situations unlike others. “To say that James is a ‘situational’ novelist is already to remark upon something basic that distinguishes him from other novelists oh his time.” (Moses 1) ¬¬¬¬¬¬Henry James being different than anyone else doesn’t necessarily mean that I was a bad thing.
Henry James was very observant of the way people around him act. It was like if he was studying them to make his next step in his career. “James once observed that everyone in life, is incomplete, and it is the work of art in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify the, as it were.” (Raw 2)