Henry James

Henry James (1843 - 1916) was an American novelist, born in New York. He studied law at Harvard, but was eventually drawn into literature, and after a spell of magazine work established his reputation as a novelist in 1875 with "Roderick Hudson". The most of his life has been spent in Italy and England, and the writing of fiction has been varied with several volumes of felicitous criticism, chiefly on French life and literature. His novels are characterised by a charming style, by a delicate discriminating analysis of rather uneventful lives, and by an almost complete absence of strong dramatic situation.

Wisdom & Quotes

• Art without life is a poor affair.

- The Art of Fiction

• Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

- quoted in Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Gerard Manley Hopkins