Novelist and short story writer Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New York City. His father was a theological thinker, and his brother was William James, a pioneering philosopher.

A self-described “devourer of libraries,” James loved to travel and write about the world he encountered. He moved to Paris in 1875, then to London where he penned his first best-seller, Daisy Miller (1878).

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” he believed.

A life-long bachelor, James explored what he called “Americano-European legends” with complex characters in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). His fifty-year literary career captured the spirit of place and the nuance of cultural identity.

An influence on Gertrude Stein, Emile Zola, and T.S. Eliot, James observed in The Madonna of the Future (1879), “Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there!”

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” he wrote in The Ambassadors (1903). “It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?”

Henry James reminds us to root every gesture in kindness, whether spoken or written. Can we live with compassion, again and again?