Full name: Alice James: A Biography

Author: Jean Strouse Year: 1980 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Non Fiction, History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781590174531 1590174534

The Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary and distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry's novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, and William's groundbreaking philosophical and psychological works have won these brothers a permanent place at the center of the nation's cultural firmament. Less well known is their enigmatic younger sister, Alice. But as Jean Strouse's generous, probing, and deeply sympathetic biography shows, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tormented throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention and internal conflict from achieving the worldly success she desired, Alice was nonetheless a vivid, witty writer, an acute social observer, and as alert, inquiring, and engaging a person as her two famous brothers. "The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," writes Strouse, "Alice simply lived." Similar books: Paul Newman by Shawn Levy Louisa May Alcott by Martha Saxton Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Bravemouth by Pamela Stephenson Uncle Mame by Eric Myers Invisible Writer by Greg Johnson Mary Renault by David Sweetman Flannery by Brad Gooch May Sarton by Margot Peters Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster George Orwell by Gordon Bowker In Search of J.D. Salinger by Ian Hamilton The Wright Brothers by David McCullough Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Mobituaries by Mo Rocca