Certain readers and critics have faulted Henry James for two contradictory reasons. He has been thought a writer limited in scope and depth in his treatment of a particular class of people. On the other hand, he has been thought to be too complex, too extreme in putting into difficult language his view of relationships between his chosen characters.

Elizabeth Stevenson depicts Henry James as a stout and strong presence in the literature of the English language. From the relatively youthful, straightforward, and simple writing of his early years, to the involved complexities of his...

His great grandfather and his grandfather had been presidents of the United States, and to a small boy this seemed a matter of course in his family. But Henry Adams, belonging to a later generation, coming to maturity at the time of the Civil War, found himself in an age uncongenial to the leadership of such men as his ancestors. In the changing world of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Adams found his rightful place as an observer and critic rather than a participant in public life. But no time and no country ever had a keener mind to take note of the comic and...

Babbitts and Bohemians is a fresh and informed account of the 1920s, a decade that seems almost mythical to some. Elizabeth Stevenson finds that the true twenties was a society of contrast. On the one hand, it was an era of sameness and political conformity, but on the other hand, it was also a time of cultural revolt. In places labeled Main Street and Middletown the citizenry followed a conventional pattern. At the same time, while most of America enjoyed the good life of this period, bohemians in Greenwich Village and expatriates in Paris were fervently...