31 Jul Henry James
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City. As a young man he traveled extensively in Europe, eventually settling in London in 1869 and becoming a British subject in 1915 (less than a year before his death at the age of 72). Lamb House – an 18th Century property in the small town of Rye on the Sussex coast – was his home from 1898 to 1914. While living there James wrote his three greatest novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). The house is now looked after by the National Trust and is worth visiting on your next literary tour of England.
James was a prolific writer. His other much-loved novels include The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Washington Square (1880) (adapted as The Heiress (1949) by William Wyler), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886) and What Maisie Knew (1897); also the novellas Daisy Miller (1878), The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). Per Wikipedia, he is best known for “dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, English people and continental Europeans”.