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wisest of friends”). Henry James is the last alive of the five siblings (“I feel stricken & old & ended”).
    1911 “Revises” The Outcry, written as a play in 1909, as a minor novel. Health improves; begins work on first autobiographical volume. Awarded honorary degree from Harvard. Wharton, Gosse, and Howells lobby unsuccessfully to have Nobel Prize awarded to him.
    1912 Receives honorary doctorate from Oxford ( “fecundissimum et facundissimum scriptorem” ). Judging James’s finances as precarious, Wharton secretly arranges to have $8,000 of her Scribner’s royalties offered him as an “advance”; his spirits improved, returns to work on The Ivory Tower.
    1913 James’s seventieth birthday; distinguished John Singer Sargent portrait commissioned by almost three hundred friends. Publishes first autobiographical volume, A Small Boy and Others.
    1914 Publishes second autobiographical volume, Notes of a Son and Brother (final volume, The Middle Years, is published posthumously in 1917). Health troubles continue (“desiccated antiquity”). Devastated by outbreak of war (“black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers”). Supports Britain at war; visits soldiers in London hospitals. Meets the forty-year-old Winston Churchill.
    1915 H. G. Wells launches satirical attack on James in Boon. James destroys more letters and personal papers. In support of wartime England, and after forty years in that country, is naturalized as a British citizen (“Civis Britannicus Sum!”). Suffers first stroke in December (“So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing”).
    1916 Receives the Order of Merit, January 1. Suffers final illness; dies February 28. Ashes are interred in James family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgments
    Deep thanks to Anne Drury Hall, who reads Henry James just as he would have wished to be read. To David Wyatt, with whom talk about James, as about most things, calls up all my powers. To Peter Mallios, who sleeps with Emerson under his pillow. To Elizabeth Anania Edwards, back then and now. To K. C. Summers and Craig Stolz, who let me think Jamesian thoughts while wandering around Cambodia, Mali, Bolivia, and India. To Jackie DeCesaris, for her mind and fine spirit. The care, generosity, and constant good will of Michael Mill-man, Barbara Campo, and Cathy Dexter—my editors at Penguin Putnam—helped make this project an uncommon pleasure. My warm thanks also go to friends and colleagues who have given help and support in ways they may not always recall: Sylvie Bouvier, Glen Schroeder, Zoé, Taï, and Hugo, Kerry Armstrong, Marlene Ellin, Phil Reed, Ted Leinwand, Richard Cross, Kent Cartwright, Claudio Filippone, Sandra Morrison, Richard Fletcher, Todd McDaniel, Massimo Giuliani, Elizabeth Loizeaux, Sharon Kozberg, Michael Teitelman, William C. Hunter of Tokyo and far-off Belize, Alessandra Angelini of Rome—and of course her matchless Jambo. And this year in particular, in a special way I thank my brother, Steve Auchard.

I
    FICTION
    In his lifetime Henry James published 114 tales and twenty novels. Two incomplete novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, were published posthumously. The present edition must be content to offer a sampling of the shorter fiction, since, for example, The Portrait of a Lady runs to almost ten times the length of the “nouvelle” Daisy Miller and generally comes in at over 500 pages. Although it was as a novelist that James had his most serious ambitions, there need be no apology for the achievement of his tales, and in fact the prefaces to the New York Edition provide serious, shrewd, tantalizing comment on all the following works—except for the late and potentially self-referential “The Jolly Corner,” about which James does little more than note, uncharacteristically, that “there would be more to say than my space allows.”

Daisy Miller: A Study
    Cornhill Magazine, June-July 1878. Rejected by the American Lippincott Magazine