SOURCE: An excerpt from Notes of a Son and Brother, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914, pp. 155-212; 213-47.

The second son of Henry James, Sr., Henry James, Jr., was a novelist, short story writer, critic, and essayist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is admired as a lucid and insightful critic and is regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the English language. In the following excerpt from his autobiographical volume Notes of a Son and Brother—published at a time when the elder James's works had largely been forgotten—James, Jr., offers his impressions of his father, portraying him as an absorbing and immensely humane figure.

We took his "writing" infinitely for granted—we had always so taken it, and the sense of him, each long morning, at his study table either with bent considering brow or with a half-spent and checked intensity, a lapse...