founded by Moses Dresser Phillips and Francis H. Underwood. Early contributors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Rus sell Lowell (the magazine’s first editor), and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In coming years James will be a frequent contri butor.

1859 In October Henry, Sr., takes his family to Geneva.

1860 The family returns to America in September and settles in Newport, Rhode Island.

1861 The American Civil War begins.

1862 James enrolls at Harvard Law School but drops out after a year to pursue a writing career. He becomes friendly with William Dean Howells.

1864 In February James publishes his first piece of fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” in the Continental Monthly. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies.

1865 James begins to write reviews for the Nation, a new liberal weekly. The American Civil War ends.

1866 The first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable links Europe and America, vastly increasing the speed of informa tion transmittal.

1869 In England James meets George Eliot and writes reviews of her works, including Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, which are published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Galaxy, a literary journal. Mark Twain publishes the best-selling travel book The Innocents Abroad, based on let ters he had written while journeying by steamship to Europe and the Holy Land; it treats hallowed Old World landmarks with irreverence and parodies the manners and mores of Europeans and Americans.

1870 James’s cousin Mary (“Minny”) Temple dies in March, and the author, devastated, moves back to New York. His social opportunities are abundant; he spends time at Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, and meets Henry Adams, who has just been appointed editor of the North American

Review. The Metropolitan Museum opens in New York City.

1871 James publishes his first novel, Watch and Ward, in install ments in the Atlantic; it introduces what will be a prominent Jamesian theme: the development of a young girl into wom anhood.

1872 Assigned to write a travel series for the Nation, James sails to Liverpool and spends time in Europe. Susan B. Anthony casts a vote in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, and is arrested.

1873 Financial panic grips New York with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, the nation’s preeminent investment bank. After a ten-year economic boom, the United States enters its worst depression to date, although New York continues its prodigious growth.

1875 James publishes in the Atlantic Monthly the novel Roderick Hudson, about an American sculptor in Rome and his strug gle to reconcile art and passion. During his early period (also called his international period), he compares the peo ple and cultures of the United States and Europe, focusing especially on the differences. While living in Paris, James as sociates with the writers Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, as well as Russian expatriate authors, including the novelist Ivan Turgenev. He works on his novel The American, about a self-made American millionaire who tries to marry the daughter of French aristocrats.

1876 Roderick Hudson is published in book form. Impatient with America’s foreign policy and disaffected with the United States in general, James joins other expatriates in London and settles permanently there. Throughout the rest of the 1870s, he associates with many leading English writers and thinkers and becomes an important presence on the Anglo American literary scene.

1877 The American is published in book form. James is friendly with Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, and Robert Browning. While in Rome, James hears about an American “child of nature and of freedom” who consorted with a “good-looking Roman, of vague identity.” James is immedi ately inspired to turn this story into a novel, Daisy Miller.

1878 James publishes the short novel The Europeans. The Mac millan Publishing Company of London asks him to write a bi ography of either Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne.

1879 James publishes Daisy Miller, about a young American woman in Rome, in book form. He signs a contract for the British copyright on Hawthorne, which is published in the English Men of Letters series in London.

1880 The focus of James’s writing shifts to social and psy

1881 chological drama. Washington Square is serialized in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s (1880) and released in book form ( 1881 ); the novel concerns a young American woman whose father rejects the man she wants to marry. The Portrait of a Lady is serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly ( 1880-1881 ), and in book form (1881); this brilliant novel depicts a young American woman who out of a kind of generosity marries the wrong man. James vows “never again to return”