The Turn of the Screw | Author Biography

James was born on April 15, 1843, on the edge of Greenwich Village in New York City. Born into a wealthy family, James was exposed to a traveling lifestyle. Less than a year after James was born, his parents took him and his brother, William, to London. A little over a year later, they visited Paris and then returned to New York, where they stayed for a decade.

Henry James
Henry James

As a child, James was not interested in school, and his education came periodically at day schools or from in-home tutors. People constantly surrounded James; his house was filled with an assortment of family, governesses, friends, and other visitors. Among the more distinguished visitors were writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1856, James and his family moved to Europe, where he eventually fell in love with Paris and the French language. In 1858, the family returned to America, to Newport, Rhode Island. The stay was not long, and the family moved back to Europe again in 1859. However, a year later they once again moved back to America, this time to indulge brother William's desire to study art in a Newport studio.

In 1861, the Civil War broke out in America, and two of James's brothers left to fight. James, however, had injured himself severely—although scholars do not know how exactly—and could not fight. Instead, he attended Harvard Law School for one year, apparently so that he could get access to Harvard's library, literary social scene, and literature lectures. For the five years after Harvard, James stayed with his parents at home, which at this point was Boston, since his parents had followed him to Harvard. During this time, James, who had long harbored ideas of a writing career, began to produce his own literature.

His early writings consisted of short stories, reviews of other books, and critical notes. In 1869, James traveled to England, where his family's connections put him in touch with such notable British thinkers as Charles Darwin, George Eliot and John Ruskin. He toured much of the rest of Europe, favoring Italy most. In fact, he started writing his first novel, Roderick Hudson (1876) in Florence.

James was such a prolific writer—important in the development of the modern novel—that critics have divided his literary career into three phases, based on the level of development in his craft. At the end of the middle phase, in the 1890s, James decided to experiment in a number of ways. One of these experiments, The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, is a ghost story that has kept critics guessing as to the story's interpretation and James's original intent for more than a century.

During James's final phase, known as the "major phase," he produced the novels that most critics—and James himself—consider the novelist's best works. These include The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although James was born in America, England was his adopted home for much of his life, and in 1915 he became a British citizen. James died of edema on February 28, 1916, in London.