On Writers and Writing - by Henry James (Paperback)

About the Book

"Best known as a master novelist, Henry James was also an incisive critic whose essays on the novel had as profound an influence on its development as did his fiction. Here, Pulitzer-finalist Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, gathers some of the most virtuosic essays from across fifty years of James's career. From his landmark essay "The Art of Fiction," an exhilarating treatise on the complexity of literary form, to "The Lesson of Balzac," a tender portrait of one of James's greatest touchstones, to career-defining assessments of writers such as George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev, James reveals himself as a passionate and sensitive reader, one whose unerring ability to locate the currents within Anglophone literature was matched only by his uncommon prescience regarding its future. Slyly humorous and unabashedly opinionated, On Writers and Writing is a compelling artistic biography of a writer at his cogent and stylish best"--

Book Synopsis

A new selection of Henry James's essays on the art of writing, from his famous essay "The Art of Fiction" to pieces on George Eliot, Ivan Turgenev, Honoré de Balzac, and others. Witty, erudite, and passionate, James's essays are a delight for any lover of the written word.

"James knew how to be generous without sacrificing the truth. What lends dignity and breadth to [his essays] above their directness and simplicity... is the exploratory reach of James's mind."
--Leon Edel

Henry James, the master novelist, started his literary career as a brash, often blistering reviewer, unafraid to skewer eminences like Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and continued to be a working critic for the rest of his life, driven by an unflagging desire to know what makes fiction work. James's critical essays represent an ongoing appreciation of the difficult art of the novel, searching in their consideration of story, character, and style. They also stand out as splendid contributions to the art of the essay, brilliantly argued, rich with metaphor, witty, unfailingly personal.

In this new selection of James's critical essays, Michael Gorra--the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece--draws on all the different periods of James's writing life, from his fledgling reviews in The Nation to his mature considerations of Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and William Shakespeare's The Tempest. As an overture, there is "The Art of Fiction," in which James insists that the key ingredient of fiction is not to be moral or otherwise improving but simply "to be interesting"; for a coda, "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields," a memoir of the literary New England of his boyhood. Overall, On Writers and Writing can be read as an artistic autobiography. Here we see James revisiting and revising his opinions on fiction, that exercise of heart and mind whose very meaning, he insists throughout, is freedom.

Review Quotes

"To read On Writers and Writing from cover to cover, and in the order Gorra has arranged, is an experience that surpasses in reward any contemporary writing workshop or literature seminar."
--Katherine Chen, Daily Telegraph

"Gorra is the ideal curator of James' essays . . . Here we see classic James, as in the essential essay 'The Art of Fiction, ' as well as his reviews of contemporary novels, expansive memorials and valedictions, and examinations of the forms of fiction." --Nick Ripatrazone, The Metropolitan Review

"Gorra is a close reader whose understanding of the unity of James's work arises naturally from his respect for biography and history, as well as form and style. In choosing his collection, he has done honorable service not only to the study of James but to our battered culture." --Edward Short, City Journal

"The 21 pieces take us from one end to the other trace James's evolution from youthful provocateur to established master -- from the crisp witticisms of his early prose to the exquisite intricacies of his later style." --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"Though their subject is writing, the essays here dwell still more insistently on the limits and intimacy of conversation . . . the author is happily privy to 'all the eagerest and easiest and funniest, all the most winged and kept-up, most illustrational and suggestion, table-talk that ever was.'" --Alicia Rix, TLS

About the Author

Henry James (1843-1916), the younger brother of the psychologist William James and one of the greatest of American writers, was born in New York but lived for most of his life in England. Among the best known of his many stories and novels are The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, and The Wings of the Dove.

Michael Gorra is a writer and scholar. His book Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. He teaches at Smith College.