Henry Jr. loved his father and mother and his brothers and sister, but he also loved independence. He wanted only to write, and he wanted to write what he wanted to write, and he wanted to go where he wanted to go, and he wanted to answer to no one but himself. Ultimately, he wrote to make art. But he also wrote to unencumber himself, to free himself to make art. He wrote to write. For him, writing was its own purpose—but not its only purpose, not every time he sat down at his writing table.

In an era when relatively few members of the literate middle-and upper-middle classes could afford to travel for pleasure, touring by surrogate was the next best thing. There was a healthy market for travel writing. It was a circulation builder, and the magazines were eager to cash in. Even a small, intellectually elite journal like The Nation—which, then as now, lived for politics, with a sideline in cultural criticism—wanted in on the action.

In a modest way, so did James. Money seldom motivates writers at today’s Nation, but for James at yesterday’s, it was high on the list. The fees he earned for these pieces—$50 each—may not sound like much, but they were enough to take him much of the way toward self-sufficiency as he meandered through the northeastern United States, Britain, and Western Europe during the 1870s, piling up impressions that, sooner or later, would turn up in his novels and stories.

Henry James was, almost literally, a born traveler. He was barely six months old in October 1843, when, with his family, he crossed the Atlantic for the first time. (The Jameses went in style, aboard the Great Western, a paddle-wheel, wooden-hulled steamship of unprecedented size and luxury.) He made four more crossings in his teens, attending a bewildering variety of schools, studying with a succession of private tutors, and making of himself a bilingual habitué of London, Paris, and Geneva. In the 1860s he was back in the United States, mostly in Boston and Cambridge. He didn’t return to Europe until 1869, this time as a full-grown man and emphatically on his own, for fifteen months of intensive travel—London again, Paris again, Geneva again, and then, in a state of something like ecstasy, Italy: Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Pisa, Naples, Genoa, Florence, and Rome. When he came home again to Cambridge, he was twenty-seven. He had not yet written a book and was not yet famous, but his reviews and stories had made him a favorite of the editors of the better magazines. Leon Edel, the definitive James biographer, summarizes his subject’s next move—and the motives behind it:

He was barely resettled in Quincy Street in the early summer of 1870 when he persuaded The Nation to accept a series of travel articles from his pen—pictures of Rhode Island, Vermont, New York. It was an opportunity to earn some ready money; it was also a way of convincing The Nation how lively a travel writer he could be—especially if he were in Europe.

There was, however, a deeper prompting. He would be “haunted and wracked,” he told [his dear friend] Grace Norton, if he returned to Europe with a “thankless ignorance and neglect” of his homeland. He would therefore “see all I can of America and rub it in with unfaltering zeal.” His tour consisted of a month in Saratoga, where he drank the waters and “cunningly noted many of the idiosyncrasies of American civilization”; a week at Lake George; a fortnight at Pomfret, where his parents were on holiday; and a fortnight at Newport.”d

At least three things are especially striking about this: First, young James considers himself enough of a stranger in the land of his birth that he feels obliged to undertake a field trip, a systematic program of self-education aimed at familiarizing himself with its physical and social features. Second, he proposes to tour an extraordinarily narrow slice of his country. In order to “see all I can of America,” he draws up an itinerary consisting entirely of prosperous resort communities in the Northeast. Third, in addition to boning up on “America” and earning a bit of money, he aims to induce The Nation to subsidize his travel in Europe, the place for which his zeal was truly unfaltering. His six Nation essays on American places leverage seventeen more from England, Scotland, France, Germany, and, most lovingly, Italy.

Edel’s snapshot provides a glimpse of the strategic genius of James’s generalship of his career. From the beginning, he marched toward greatness in stately fashion, according to an inner schedule. His ambition was vast, his confidence in his art and ability unfathomable. He was his own teacher, his own mentor, his own critic, his own taskmaster. The ultimate result, over time, was a body of work unmatched for filigreed quality as well as sheer quantity.