SOURCE: "The Final Preface: Henry James's Autobiography," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXVII, No. 2, Spring, 1969, pp. 277-293.

In the following essay, Hoffa examines the motivation, method, and mood underlying Henry James's Autobiography.

Though we today readily place the two and one-third volumes about his youth which Henry James published in the late years of his life in the genre of autobiography, it is clear from the few records which James has left us that his intentions for the project underwent a considerable shift before and even during the time of its composition. James had always been wary of the "devilish art of biography", in spite of his two full-length biographies—of Hawthorne in 1879, and William Wetmore Story in 1903—and his numerous biographical-critical sketches of other writers. Thus he did not even subtitle the work "Autobiography", though, as F. W. Dupee has suggested, this is the "simplest, the most...