Friction with the Market: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship Book

Of all the legends of the Master, perhaps the most enduring is the one that James himself deliberately cultivated—a portrait of the artist in an ivory tower, writing in isolation from the coarse demands of the literary marketplace. In this provocative new book, Michael Anesko argues that we have uncritically accepted James's idealized and melodramatic vision for too long. Abundant evidence exists, Anesko contends, to prove that through the literary marketplace James maintained an active, if ambivalent, link to "the world" and that his finished works were shaped not only by his imagination, but as he once had occasion to remark, by a constant and lively "friction with the market." Anesko draws upon previously unexamined evidence—publisher's records, correspondence between James and his editors, and documents detailing the novelist's literary income—to reveal new ties between often harsh economic realities and the inner workings of James's "grasping imagination."