House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family

An American odyssey that reveals the fascinating complexities of one of history’s most brilliant, eccentric, and daring families.

“In this amazing portrait of a family that may have been the Royal Tenenbaums of the nineteenth century, Paul Fisher has written a biography which brings the Jameses to lie on the page as if they were our own fascinating, brilliant friends and neighbors.” —Susan Cheever, author of American Bloomsbury

The James family, one of America’s most memorable dynasties, gave the world three famous children: a novelist of genius (Henry), an influential philosopher (William), and an invalid (Alice) who became a feminist icon, despite her sheltered life and struggles with mental illness. Although much has been written on them, many truths about the Jameses have long been camouflaged. The conflicts that defined one of American’s greatest families—homosexuality, depression, alcoholism, female oppression—can only now be thoroughly investigated and discussed with candor and understanding.

Paul Fisher’s grand family saga, House of Wits, rediscovers a family traumatized by the restrictive standards of their times but reaching out for new ideas and ways to live. He follows the five James offspring (“hotel children,” Henry called them) and their parents through their privileged travels across the Atlantic; interludes in Newport and Cambridge; the younger boys’ engagement in the Civil War; and William and Henry’s later adventures in London, Paris, and Italy. He captures the splendor of their era and all the members of the clan—beginning with their mercurial father, who nurtured, inspired, and damaged them, setting the stage for lives of colorful passions, intense rivalries, and extraordinary achievements. House of Wits is a revealing cultural history that revises and completes our understanding of its remarkable protagonists and the changing world where they came of age.

“A sweeping biography . . . [Fisher] gives fair and sympathetic time to everyone, and provides a lively and detailed social history of the period.” —The New York Times

“[A] highly readable, carefully researched account of one off the most astonishing families America has produced.” —Evening Standard (London)

© 2024 Henry Holt and Co. (E-bog): 9781466855076

Release date

E-bog: 2. juli 2024