Biography of henry james writer leon

His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist tradition of Austen, George Eliot, Flauberty and Balzac, and a decisive step towards the experimental modernism of Woolf and T. His works often focus upon an innocent American in Europe, and assess the qualities and dangers of both American and European culture at the time, as well as showing their vast differences.

He received a master's degree in English from McGill University in Montreal in and a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris in Henry James, a Life. Leon Edel. Leon Edel books 6 followers. From to , he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Compass. Write a Review. Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews. Search review text. Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews. Jee Koh. Author 23 books followers. I started reading Volume One in December, and now it is March. The reading was fitful, most of it done during school breaks and long weekends. So, at least, 21 years to research and write this Life.

Biography of henry james writer leon

Smith , and with them founded the influential McGill Fortnightly Review. For the academic year —, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University. He discussed his time at camp in his memoir "The Visitable Past". From to , he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Compass.

Edel discussed the notion of biography in Literary Biography , in particular his conviction that literary biography should enfold a subjective author's self-perceptions into his output. Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography [ 7 ] and a National Book Award for Nonfiction [ 8 ] in Edel enjoyed privileged access to letters and documents from James' life housed in the Widener Library at Harvard University, after gaining the blessing of members of James' family.

He referred to other scholars who sought access in vain as 'trespassers'. The discovery of impassioned but inconclusive letters written in — by James to the Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, while Edel was deep in the process of finishing his biography caused an ethical crisis; his decision was to continue to ignore what he considered a peripheral aspect of the self-identified "celibate" and sexually diffident James's life.

Edel did treat James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen at length, especially in volumes three and four of the biography. After weighing all the evidence, Edel confessed that he was unable to decide whether James experienced a consummated sexual relationship. Although later scholarship and new materials have called into question the accuracy of his portrait of James, [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Edel's work remains an important source for studies of the author.

Novick's volume "caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles" [ 11 ] as, like other more recent biographies of Walt Whitman and John Singer Sargent, it challenged the notion, deriving from a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was non-existent, that James lived a celibate life. Novick also criticized Edel for following a discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure.

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