Traveling often throughout his long and productive life, Henry James wrote fiction and travel literature about Americans in Europe and Europeans in America during the great epoch of transatlantic tourism and exchange in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born to a family of writers in New York City before the Civil War, he died in London during World War I, a distinguished citizen of Great Britain and a major novelist in the "great tradition" of European letters. Though he is best known as a master of the international theme in tales and novels such as Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and The Ambassadors (1903), James—like his friends and fellow novelists Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Henry Adams—also wrote letters and sketches that enrich and expand the genre of travel literature while tracing a history of taste, culture, and the writer's art.

James's...