From
agoodealofbooks, Ypsilanti, MI, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since October 5, 2025
very clean hardcover with jacket. no marks. clean text. solid binding. very light wear. ISBN matches listing Fast service with confirmation, no international or priority orders over 4lbs. Seller Inventory # mon0000185276
The Complete Notebooks of Henry James opens a wide, clear window into the private workshop of America's master novelist, the architect of modernism in fiction. It is a volume that deserves to be called definitive.
Assembled and edited by Leon Edel, James's much-acclaimed prizewinning biographer, and Lyall H. Powers, critic and editor of James's letters to Edith Wharton, this book includes the nine scribbler-notebooks that were published by Oxford in 1947; these have been considerably updated and annotated to correct the identification of stories developed by James from his various notes and to reveal many noted Victorians James concealed through use of their initials. Certain omitted portions of the notebooks have also been restored.
This volume is especially noteworthy for the body of new material that it contains. It includes a series of James's pocket diaries in which, amid appointments and luncheon dates, he jotted down observations and ideas for his fiction and commented on his personal relations. Also here are some fugitive dictated notes, in which James offered an autobiographcial meditation on the "turning Point in his life and the "working out" of a story based on a passion murder by an American acquaintance in the south of France.
James's long out-of-print statements for his unfinished novels The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, scenarios for unfinished plays, the writer's deathbed dictation--all these are here as well. An appendix includes a substantial fragment of a story James never completed, and the book even provides insight into James's "cash accounts." Everywhere throughout the collection, in writings never intended for the public eye, the artist is seen at work. his private prayers to his Muse and exhortations to himself make exhilarating reading.
About the Author:
About the Editors:
Leon Edel is the author of Life of Henry James which received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Arts and Letters.
Lyall H. Powers is Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan and is author and editor of several critical studies of Henry James.
Title: The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The ...
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 1987
Binding: hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included