Here at last is the first volume of the long--awaited edition of Henry James letters by the world's foremost Jamesian scholar. James was a superlative letter-writer; his correspondence constitutes one of the greateat self-portraits in all literature. In this edition Mr. Edel, respecting James's view that only the best of a writer's letters deserve publication, skims the cream of the fifteen thousand letters collected or discovered, many by the biographer himself, since the novelist's death in 1916. In volume one, the first of a projected four, he provides a general introduction and a necessary minimum of annotation, and prefaces each section-- Boyhood and Youth; Beginnings; The Grand Tour; A Season in Cambridge; Travel and Opportunity; and The Choice--with an informative account of James's attitudes and activities during the period in question. The volume closes, appropriately, with James's decision in 1875, at age thirty-two, to move permanently to Europe.

Among his many accomplishments over some forty years devoted to James scholarship, Leon Edel is the author of the monumental five-volume Life of Henry James, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is Citizens Professor of English at the University of Hawaii.

Other HUP Books by Henry James

• Henry James: Selected Letters
• The Letters of Henry James, Volume IV, 1895-1916
• The Letters of Henry James, Volume III, 1883-1895
• The Letters of Henry James, Volume II, 1875-1883

Other HUP Books by Leon Edel

• The Letters of Henry James, Volume II, 1875-1883
• The Letters of Henry James, Volume III, 1883-1895
• The Letters of Henry James, Volume IV, 1895-1916
• Henry James: Selected Letters