Henry James

James grew up crossing the Atlantic; his father dragged the family between New York, Geneva, and London chasing the best tutors, and the pattern set for life: brother of the philosopher William James, he settled permanently in England at thirty-three and rarely returned. A vague back injury kept him from Civil War service, and he never married.

Success came steadily but modestly; the plays he wrote chasing a wider audience flopped, one famously booed on its opening night. In his last decade, crippling wrist pain forced him to dictate his novels (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl), pacing the room while a typist transcribed sentences of increasing, spiraling complexity.

In 1915, outraged at American neutrality in the First World War, he became a British subject; he died the following year, having just received the Order of Merit.