Genuine Reality: A Life of William James » (1)

LINDA SIMON is a professor of English at Skidmore College. She is the author of four biographies, including Genuine Reality:A Life of Henry James and The Biography of Alice B.Toklas. She lives in Saratoga Springs, NewYork.

This first full biography of William James in nearly a generation brings us the man alive in all his complexity. Intellectual rebel, romantic pragmatist, aristocratic pluralist, James was both a towering figure of the nineteenth century and a springboard into the twentieth century. Constitutionally opposed to the rigidity and stability of the nineteenth century, James guided his generation toward the ambivalence, unpredictability, and indeterminacy of the times that followed. His explorations of pluralism and pragmatism for modern psychology and recognized the possibility of multiple perspectives long before Cubism. "The word 'or'" he once wrote, "names a genuine reality." Profiting from a rich range of sources, among them 1,500 letters written between James and his wife, Alice, acclaimed biographer Linda Simon creates an intimate portrait of this multifaceted and contradictory man. Exploring James in the context of this irrepressible family, his diverse and often quirky friends, and the cultural and political forces to which he so energetically responded, Simon weaves the many threads of William James's life into a genuine, and vibrant, reality.

Publishers Weekly

G.K. Chesterton complained that although James popularized philosophy, it was unfortunate that it was his own philosophy. Rejecting theory, James contended in what he labeled Pragmatism that the meaning of any idea can be found only in its experiential consequences. How he got there in the face of academic philosophy is the narrative thread of Simon's biography, which traces James (1842-1910) through the irregular and undisciplined schooling dictated by his restless and cranky father to medical, then psychological studies that led through physiology to what was then called mental science. Educational tyranny at home resulted in erratic health, nervous breakdowns and episodes of panic that finally pushed James into asserting that he was "cut out for a speculative rather than an active life." Independence and marriage at 36 failed to end his chronic depression, but domestic felicity and the economic pressures of a growing family turned him into a popular and much-read thinker. Not content as a Harvard professor, he remained because other posts eluded him, and he produced an influential text, Principles of Psychology, in 1890, and in 1902, Varieties of Religious Experience. He had formulated "both a philosophy of psychology and a psychology of philosophy." Simon (The Biography of Alice B. Toklas) eschews the jargon of both disciplines in bringing to life a complex intellectual who relentlessly questioned the orthodoxies of his time. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Feb.)

Introduction
1. Mortification
2. Gestation
3. Appetites and Affections: 1847-1855
4. Other People's Rules: 1855-1860
5. Spiritual Dangers: 1860-1865
6. Descent: 1866-1870
7. Absolute Beginnings: 1870-1874
8. Engaged: 1875-1878
9. Gifts: 1878-1882
10. An Entirely New Segment of Life: 1882-1884
11. The Lost Child: 1885-1887
12. Family Romance: 1888-1890
13. Surcharged with Vitality: 1890-1893
14. Real Fights: 1894-1896
15. Civic Genius: 1897-1898
16. A Gleam of the End: 1899-1901
17. A Temper of Peace
18. Mental Pirouettes: 1906-1907
19. The Pitch of Life: 1908-1909
20. Eclipse: 1910
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index