This volume begins a new series: William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, starting when William James was fourteen and on his second trip abroad and concluding when he was thirty-five, negotiating with the president of Johns Hopkins University about a course he had been invited to teach on the relation between mind and body. These letters deal with everything from his protracted search for a vocation, his recurrent physical and emotional problems, his irregular education, his odd -- one might say Jamesian -- courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens, and his developing...

This volume charts James's emergence into professional and personal maturity while chronicling the decisive steps he took toward resolving his notoriously protracted and difficult search for a profession. He published his first substantial signed articles and also undertook some shrewd academic maneuvering that would secure him a chair in philosophy despite his lack of formal training.

William and Henry James are well known for their master works of psychology and fiction respectively, but the celebrated brothers amassed an impressive collection of letters to one another as well. Through their copious correspondence, readers are privy to the private thoughts of these intellectual heavyweights. Sure, their letters expound on philosophical, political, social, and cultural subjects with imagination and wit, but more often they focus on the quotidian: health, news of friends and family, mutual praise, advice, complaints, and good-natured ribbing. What makes these 216...

After years of procrastination and false starts, James finally completed most of the work during this peroid on a book destined to become a classic in its field: The Principles of Psychology. He continues his dialogue with established correspondents onf the psychological and philosophical issues of the day and displays a blossoming interest psychical research, much of it centered on Leonora Piper, the American trance medium. James's interest in his graduate students reveals itself in his correspondence with (among others) George Santayana and Charles Augustus Strong, both of whom sought...

Consisting of some 572 letters, with another 460 calendared, this tenth volume in a projected series of twelve offers a complete accounting of William James's known correspondence--with family, friends, and colleagues--from the beginning of 1902 through March 1905.

For James these were hopeful years of recovery. The end of the depressing cure at Nauheim, the successful conclusion of the arduous Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, the reaching maturity and independence of his two eldest children, and the gradual withdrawal from teaching responsibilities at Harvard allowed him to hope that...

This twelfth and final volume of The Correspondence of William James concludes the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that began with volume 4. The first three volumes were devoted to the letters exchanged between the brothers William and Henry James. Consisting of some 600 letters, with an additional 650 letters calendared, this final volume gives a complete accounting of James's known correspondence from April of 1908 to 21 August 1910, inclusive, the last letter having been written five days before James's death on 26 August 1910. The volume...