FROM THE PUBLISHER

Henry James, renowned as one of the world's great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This volume and its companion are a fitting testimony to his unprecedented achievement. They offer the only comprehensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, more than one third of which have never before appeared in book form. This first volume focuses especially on his responses to American and English writers; the second volume contains his essays on European literature and the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction. From 1864 until virtually the end of his life, James displayed an astonishing range and catholicity of critical interests, touching on nearly every facet of literature in America, England, and Europe. Here are his most important theoretical essays, including his witty and daring declarations of the novelist's freedom in "The Art of Fiction," "The Future of the Novel," and "The Science of Criticism" - a gently ironic title from a writer who regarded criticism as a form of art.

Appreciations of Ralph Waldo Emerson ("I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends"), pungent comments (which he later regretted) on Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, and assessments of Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, his friend and admirer William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Francis Parkman, and scores of other American writers are joined, in revealing proximity, to commentaries on nearly every important English writer of fiction (and some poets, like the Brownings) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.