To my sense, these mighty Alpine highways have a grand poetry of their own. I lack, doubtless, that stout stomach for pure loneliness which leads your genuine mountaineer to pronounce them a desecration of the mountain stillness. As if the mountain stillness were not inviolable! Gleaming here and there against the dark sides of the gorges, unrolling their measured bands further and higher, doubling and stretching and spanning, but always climbing, they break it only to the anxious eye. The Saint Gothard road is immensely long drawn, and, if the truth be told, somewhat monotonous. As you follow it to its uppermost reaches, the landscape takes on a darker local color. Far below the wayside, the yellow Reuss tumbles and leaps and foams over a perfect torture-bed of broken rock. The higher slopes lie naked and raw, or coated with slabs of gray. The valley lifts and narrows and darkens into the scenic mountain pass of the fancy.
“A dignified and impressive addition to your bookshelf that reveals James’s virtuoso performance in a genre he helped to define, refine and elevate.” — The Commercial Appeal This Library of America volume, the first of five of Henry James’s short fiction, brings together his first twenty-four published stories, thirteen never collected by James. Encompassing a wide range of subjects, settings, and formal techniques, they show the first explorations of some of James’s most significant themes: the force of social convention and the compromises it demands; the complex and often ambiguous encounter between Europe and America; the energies of passion measured against the rigors of artistic discipline. By his mid-twenties, James was a regular contributor to the most prestigious and popular magazines of his era. He is equally at ease writing historical tales, such as “Gabrielle de Bergerac,” a love story set in pre-Revolutionary France, as he is exploring contemporary events, as in the three stories that treat the effects of the American Civil War on civilians. James’s psychological acuity is already evident in “Master Eustace,” a study of the ruthlessness of a spoiled child, and in “Guest’s Confession,” where the comic portrayal of an arrogant businessman hints at his cruelty and self-absorption. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” and “The Last of the Valerii,” James begins to work with the supernatural and fantastic motifs that would continue to surface in his work. Early examples of James’s lifelong fascination with art and artists include “A Landscape Painter,” about a young painter’s attraction to a seemingly simple family living in a desolate coastal town, and “The Madonna of the Future,” where an aging artist avoids the unveiling of his masterpiece. Adumbrating later triumphs and compelling in their own right, these stories reveal and accomplished and cosmopolitan young talent mastering the art of the short story. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. While Watch and Ward has long been dismissed as an early apprentice work, it marks an important stage in James's development as a fiction writer, building upon the stories he wrote during the late 1860s and pointing, at the same time, to the works he would write during the ensuing decade and which would secure his reputation, including 'Daisy Miller', The American and The Portrait of a Lady. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand the novel's historical, cultural and literary references.
