Henry James (1843-1916) spent his early life in America but often traveled with his celebrated family to Europe. After briefly attending Harvard, he began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines. Later, he visited Europe and began Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875, he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola and wrote The American. In 1876, he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. His other famous works include The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassma (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject.

Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Singular Mark Twain, A Biography; Gore Vidal, A Biography; Henry James, The Imagination of Genius and Charles Dickens, A Biography. His Thomas Carlyle was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and was a jury-nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Other works include Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature, Dickens and Mesmerism: the Hidden Spring of Fiction, and Miracles of Rare Device: The Poet's Sense of Self in Nineteenth-Century Poetry.