On Writers and Writing

A new selection of Henry James's essays on the art of writing, from his famous essay "The Art of Fiction" to pieces on George Eliot, Ivan Turgenev, Honoré de Balzac, and others. Witty, erudite, and passionate, James's essays are a delight for any lover of the written word.

Best known as a master novelist, Henry James was also an incisive critic whose essays on the novel had as profound influence on its development as his fiction. Here, Pulitzer-finalist Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, gathers some of the most virtuosic essays from across fifty years of James’s career. From his landmark essay “The Art of Fiction,” an exhilarating treatise on the complexity of literary form, to “The Lesson of Balzac,” a tender portrait of one of James’s greatest touchstones, to career-defining assessments of writers such as George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev, James reveals himself as a passionate and sensitive reader, one whose unerring ability to locate the currents within Anglophone literature was matched only by his uncommon prescience regarding its future. Slyly humorous and unabashedly opinionated, The Lesson of Balzac is a compelling artistic biography of a writer at his cogent and stylish best.