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1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/James, Henry

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13618941922 Encyclopædia Britannica — James, Henry

JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916), Anglo-American man of letters (see 15.143), died in London Feb. 28 1916. In 1913 nearly 300 of his English friends presented him with his portrait by J. S. Sargent, on the occasion of his 70th birthday; in the following year the portrait was damaged by a militant suffragette as it hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. The outbreak of the World War aroused in him such a passionate sympathy for England and her Allies that he decided to identify himself once for all with England and to apply for naturalization. On July 26 1915 he became a British subject. The following Jan. he was awarded the Order of Merit, the insignia being brought to him on his sick-bed by his friend Viscount Bryce. His later works include A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), The Middle Years (1917, left uncompleted). Two unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, appeared in 1917. In 1915 he contributed a preface to the Letters from America of Rupert Brooke, and his impressions of the war were published in 1919 under the title of Within the Rim.

See The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. (1920).