Henry James wrote about what happens inside people — and in such detail that some readers lost the thread of the plot. He was called a master of psychological prose; Flaubert said that this kind of analysis of consciousness was the highest thing a novelist could do.
He was born in New York in 1843. His father was a wealthy philosopher; his brother was William James, the philosopher and psychologist. His childhood was divided between America and Europe, and in 1876 he settled in London for good.
The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl — novels about the collision of American innocence with European sophistication, about lost chances, about what a person makes of a life.
He wrote slowly and revised everything. In 1915 he became a British subject, in protest at America's neutrality in the war. He died in 1916.