Leon Edel

"The Visitable Past: A Wartime Memoir is a fascinating account of the late Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer's experience as a member of a psychological warfare unit during the liberation of France. Arriving in Normandy a month after D-Day, he was part of the de Gaulle force that entered Paris, the scene of Edel's own student days during the late 1920s and 1930s."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on the last years of the American novelist's life, the author provides a vivid image of the man and artist.

Examines the lives, careers, achievements, and influence of the "Bloomsburies": economist Maynard Keynes, political scientist Leonard Woolf, authors Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, critics Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy, and painters Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry.

Henry James Jr. (1843-1916) came from a well-to-do family in New York City that associated with such intellectuals as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. After studying medicine at Harvard, James went on to write the groundbreaking Principles of Psychology, praised by the Society for Psychical Research. Although he wrote, “I don’t want everyone to like me,” in A Portrait of a Lady, it seemed that everyone did, and he found critical and commercial success with such brilliant works as Daisy Miller, The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw, and Washington Square. Published in 1916, Henry James is a critical study.

This is the first full biographyt of James Joyce since Richard Ellmann's scholarly work, published in 1959.