ABSTRACT
Henry James, whom his friend William Dean Howells spoke of as the greatest novelist who ever lived, was born in 1843, the younger brother, by a year, of the celebrated philosopher William James. He was ineligible to serve in the Civil War because of lameness, but the war was brought home to him by the enlistment of two of his brothers. He came closest to it perhaps in an early novella, Daisy Miller, a sympathetic study of an American girl in a European setting whose pathetic end is said to have brought tears to the eyes of contemporary readers. It is the account of a trip to America, the first in twenty years that James had taken from England in 1904 at the age of sixty. It is only fair to James to note that he lived long enough to be ashamed of the judgment and to try to bury it from public view.
