Henry James

Henry James was born in New York City in 1843 into an intellectually prominent family that included his brother, the philosopher and psychologist William James, and his sister, the diarist Alice James. He travelled repeatedly in Europe, settled there for most of his adult life and made the encounter between American and European societies one of the central subjects of his fiction. Major works include The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

James helped move the English-language novel toward sustained psychological point of view, moral ambiguity and close attention to the pressures exerted by money, family and social convention. His prefaces and criticism were also influential statements about the craft of fiction. During the First World War he became a British subject in 1915, a public gesture of identification with the country in which he had long lived. He died in Chelsea in February 1916 and was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gore Vidal’s Empire places Henry James among the real writers, politicians, diplomats and newspaper magnates moving through the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. James is not the novel’s principal subject; his presence helps Vidal establish an intellectual and social milieu in which private conversation, journalism and political expansion intersect. The fictional appearance should therefore be read against James’s documented transatlantic career rather than as a substitute for biography.