Underwood. Early contributors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Rus sell Lowell (the magazine’s first editor), and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In coming years James will be a frequent contri butor.
| 1859 | In October Henry, Sr., takes his family to Geneva. |
| 1860 | The family returns to America in September and settles in Newport, Rhode Island. |
| 1861 | The American Civil War begins. |
| 1862 | James enrolls at Harvard Law School but drops out after a year to pursue a writing career. He becomes friendly with William Dean Howells. |
| 1864 | In February James publishes his first piece of fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” in the Continental Monthly. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies. |
| 1865 | James begins to write reviews for the Nation, a new liberal weekly. The American Civil War ends. |
| 1866 | The first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable links Europe and America, vastly increasing the speed of informa tion transmittal. |
| 1869 | In England James meets George Eliot and writes reviews of her works, including Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, which are published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Galaxy, a literary journal. Mark Twain publishes the best-selling travel book The Innocents Abroad, based on let ters he had written while journeying by steamship to Europe and the Holy Land; it treats hallowed Old World landmarks with irreverence and parodies the manners and mores of Europeans and Americans. |
| 1870 | James’s cousin Mary (“Minny”) Temple dies in March, and the author, devastated, moves back to New York. His social opportunities are abundant; he spends time at Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, and meets Henry Adams, who has just been appointed editor of the North American |
| Review. The Metropolitan Museum opens in New York City. |
| 1871 | James publishes his first novel, Watch and Ward, in install ments in the Atlantic; it introduces what will be a prominent Jamesian theme: the development of a young girl into wom anhood. |
| 1872 | Assigned to write a travel series for the Nation, James sails to Liverpool and spends time in Europe. Susan B. Anthony casts a vote in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, and is arrested. |
| 1873 | Financial panic grips New York with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, the nation’s preeminent investment bank. After a ten-year economic boom, the United States enters its worst depression to date, although New York continues its prodigious growth. |
| 1875 | James publishes in the Atlantic Monthly the novel Roderick Hudson, about an American sculptor in Rome and his strug gle to reconcile art and passion. During his early period (also called his international period), he compares the peo ple and cultures of the United States and Europe, focusing especially on the differences. While living in Paris, James as sociates with the writers Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, as well as Russian expatriate authors, including the novelist Ivan Turgenev. He works on his novel The American, about a self-made American millionaire who tries to marry the daughter of French aristocrats. |
| 1876 | Roderick Hudson is published in book form. Impatient with America’s foreign policy and disaffected with the United States in general, James joins other expatriates in London and settles permanently there. Throughout the rest of the 1870s, he associates with many leading English writers and thinkers and becomes an important presence on the Anglo American literary scene. |
| 1877 | The American is published in book form. James is friendly with Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, and Robert Browning. While in Rome, James hears about an American “child of nature and of freedom” who consorted with a “good-looking Roman, of vague identity.” James is immedi ately inspired to turn this story into a novel, Daisy Miller. |
| 1878 | James publishes the short novel The Europeans. The Mac millan Publishing Company of London asks him to write a bi ography of either Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne. |
| 1879 | James publishes Daisy Miller, about a young American woman in Rome, in book form. He signs a contract for the British copyright on Hawthorne, which is published in the English Men of Letters series in London. |
| 1880 | The focus of James’s writing shifts to social and psy |
| 1881 | chological drama. Washington Square is serialized in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s (1880) and released in book form ( 1881 ); the novel concerns a young American woman whose father rejects the man she wants to marry. The Portrait of a Lady is serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly ( 1880-1881 ), and in book form (1881); this brilliant novel depicts a young American woman who out of a kind of generosity marries the wrong man. James vows “never again to return” to New York, in a fit of disdain over the way the city’s “oppressive” economic growth has lowered the quality of life. |
| 1882 | James travels to Washington, D.C., where he briefly meets Oscar Wilde. |
| 1886 | James publishes the first novels of his middle period: The Bostonians, the story of a struggle between a southern conser vative and an embittered suffragist, and The Princess Casamassima, an exploration of the personal dangers involved in taking up anarchism and revolution. |
| 1888 | James publishes the short novel The Aspem Papers, about a man who woos the custodian of letters by a poet he idolizes. |
| 1889 | Psychologically and financially depressed by the failure of The Bostonians, James shifts his focus to playwriting for the next six years. |
| 1890 | He publishes The Tragic Muse, about art and theater in London and Paris. His brother William publishes his ground breaking and influential Principles of Psychology, in which pragmatism and “radical empiricism” are key elements. |
| 1891 | James’s dramatization of The American fares moderately well. |
| 1895 | James’s first dramatic work written as such, Guy Domville, is booed by the opening-night audience and receives mostly negative reviews, though George Bernard Shaw praises it. |
| After little success with playwriting, James returns to writing fiction. The United States increases its involvement in a con flict between Spain and Cuba, which wants independence from Spanish rule. James opposes this involvement, calling it “none of our business.” |
| 1897 | He publishes What Maisie Knew, the story of a preadolescent girl who must choose between her parents and a governess. |
| 1898 | James publishes the ghost story The Turn of the Screw. He purchases Lamb House, in Rye, England, where he will write his last novels and letters. The Spanish-American War takes place. |
| 1900 | During the final stage of his writing career, James’s style be comes increasingly complex and convoluted. Over the next few years, he produces what are often considered his greatest works. |
| 1902 | He publishes The Wings of the Dove, about a group of peo ple who scheme to inherit a dying woman’s fortune. |
| 1903 | The Ambassadors, about an American suspicious of European ways who is won over by life in Paris, is published, as is “The Beast in the Jungle,” a story of a man who believes he is in tended for something remarkable. In London, James meets Edith Wharton. |
| 1904 | His novel of adultery The Golden Bowl is published. He trav els to the United States to oversee the production of a re vised collection of his most important works of fiction. |
| 1907 | James publishes The American Scene, his observations on what America has become. Publication of the twenty-six vol umes of the revised fiction collection, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, begins; it will continue until 1917. |
| 1908 | James publishes the story “The Jolly Corner,” an oblique commentary on the America he has left behind. |
| 1910 | In January James becomes very ill.
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