Books: What Henry James Went Through

THE. LEGEND OF THE MASTER (176 pp.) —Compiled by Simon Nowell-Smifh—Scribner ($3).

Henry James.was the Winston Spencer Churchill of fiction. Portly and bald, and one of the greatest talkers in literature, half-English by choice, as Churchill is half-American by birth, colorful, eloquent, holding fast to his opinions in the face of staggering reverses, he was to novelists what Churchill was to Britons in World War II—their battered but undefeated champion. He was the great embodiment of the idea that fiction is an art, and that it is art that makes life, that gives...