Presents the noted author's views on literary craft, sex, politics, and friendship in his letters to such correspondents as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Henry Adams, Robert Louis Stevenison, and H.G. Wells As a novelist, James portrayed the social manners of cultured, Gilded Age Americans at home and abroad. He was also a prolific letter writer whose epistolary output is unrivaled in the history of American literature. Horne, who edited James's The Tragic Muse, gathers a selection of James's voluminous correspondence and arranges it to provide biographical insights into James's development as a novelist and critic. Half of the 296 letters in this collection have not been published previously. In his writings to William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Charles Eliot Norton (among others), James discusses not only writing but also his feelings about feminism, sex, and politics. Horne introduces each letter with a brief headnote about its relationship to James's life and closes them with extensive textual notes. After 2000, the University of Nebraska will begin publishing its 30-volume edition of James 12,000 to 15,000 letters; for now, only large academic libraries with an extensive James collection will want to buy this book. -Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. An epistolary biography hewn from the mountain of Henry Jamess correspondence. An even better title might have been ``James on James,'' since the novelist wrote, by some estimates, nearly 40,000 letters. Of the 12,000 to 15,000 still extant, James scholar Horne (Henry James and Revision, not reviewed) has chosen just 296, half of which have never appeared in print before. Rather than imposing his own viewpoint on his material, he allows James himself to reveal his evolution as a writer. And a fascinating evolution it is. James may have agonized over his cash flow, but except for his celebrated funk following the failure of his 1895 play Guy Domville, he never agonized over his creative puissance. The letters reveal him to be assertive, magisterial, confident, even bullying, and eloquent to the point of elusiveness. ``Nothing is my last word on anything,'' James writes to a hapless book reviewer who once tried to corner him; ``I am interminably supersubtle and analytic.'' Horne has limited his own attempts to corner James to brief introductory notes that preface each missive and provide some necessary context. Not that all Jamess correspondents need introduction, since they include Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Adams, H.G. Wells, and Edith Wharton. But many of the lesser-known addressees do require identification, and Hornes thin paragraphs are not always adequate to the task. Had he taken greater advantage of the natural give-and-take implied by the correspondence and raised his own editorial voice, he would have gained greater coherence without losing his emphasis on primary material. But since Horne has relied on chronology to do the hard work of analytical structure, his work is less biography than exceptionally well-annotated reference. Despite his lack of rigor, Horne handsomely presents a number of previously unpublished letters that testify, in the authors own hand, to the process by which the talented youth transformed himself into a literary lion. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "...[I] spent a few enchanted weeks reading and rereading Horne's addictive volume. I haven't enjoyed a book so much in years." -- A. N. Wilson, Independent on Sunday "Horne selects and comments upon [James' letters] so skillfully that he fashions a true and shapely 'life in letters'." -- The Washington Post Book World "Philip Horne's cherishing, meticulous, ministering annotations and biographical work... make this a very good book indeed." -- Adam Petite, Evening Standard "The whole selection is most helpfully (and stylishly) edited by Philip Horne" -- Ian Hamilton, Sunday Telegraph "This highly sympathetic, splendidly wrought volume will be a treasure for James lovers and perhaps a revelation to many others." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch What Horne, an English journalist, manages to till so exquisitely is the fallow ground between stark letter collections that leave writers more or less to their own devices and interpretive-heavy literary biographies. -- The New York Times Book Review , Renee Tursi This fully annotated selection from Henry James's eloquent correspondence follows him across America, Britain and continental Europe, and offers us a broad and fascinating panorama of an age of transition, when the foundations of our own world were being laid down. Philip Horne has spent over a decade looking at the thousands of letters in archives in America and England and half of those here have never before been published. Used Book in Good Condition