James, William

William James and the James Family

William James was born on January 11, 1842, in New York City and died on August 26, 1910, in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He was a bridge figure between the intellectual and social milieu of the mid-nineteenth-century America of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the evolving international Modernist world of Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. He was part of one of America’s most remarkable families who in the generations before his birth built resources of great wealth through business and entrepreneurial success. His father, Henry Senior, was an itinerant philosopher and theologian who authored dense and idiosyncratic texts related to the work of Swedish religious figure Emanuel Swedenborg. William was the eldest of five children born to Henry Senior and his mother, Mary Robertson Walsh. His eldest brother, Henry, born in 1843, became one of America’s greatest novelists and men of letters. He had two younger brothers, Garth...