The Complete Notebooks of Henry James

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. Assembled and edited by Leon Edel, James's much-acclaimed, prize-winning biographer, and Lyall H. Powers, critic and editor of James's letters to Edith Wharton, this book includes the nine scribbler-notebooks first published in 1947, plus a wealth of new material, including a series of James's pocket diaries, scenarios for unfinished plays, his deathbed dictation, statements for his unfinished novels The Ivory Tower and A Sense of the Past, and much more. It is a volume that deserves to be called definitive. "The notebooks...exist so that [James] might there 'present, ' though only to himself, the very things he promises to 'prevent' in his published writing. That is why anyone who likes to eavesdrop on the workings of a master must be grateful to those, like Mr. Edel and Mr. Powers, who, despite him, give us the opportunity."--The New York Times Book Review "Here one is clearly in the presence of a genius; but a genius that is wholly open, unguarded. A quite illuminating and strangely moving experience."--Joyce Carol Oates