American writer and critic Henry James was BOTD in 1843. Born in New York City to a wealthy upper-class family, he and his elder brother William were raised in luxury, living variously in London, Geneva and Paris during their teens. With the outbreak of the American Civil War, his family settled in Boston, and he studied law at Harvard College, while writing and publishing short stories. By his mid-20s, he was one of America’s most successful short story writers, credited with developing the realist movement in American letters. In 1869, he embarked on his Grand Tour of Europe, meeting the leading novelists of his age, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Ivan Turgenev. He eventually settled in England, finding success with his novels The Europeans, Daisy Miller, Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady. Typically set in upper middle-class society, his narratives focused on impressionable Americans becoming corrupted by decadent European society, combining witty social portraiture with acute psychological insight. Later in life, he settled in the village of Rye in Sussex, where he produced his late-period novels The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. His 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, a Gothic tale about a governess who becomes convinced the children in her care are possessed by ghosts, became one of his most popular works. James’ romantic history has been extensively debated by biographers and literary critics. Typically portrayed as a lifelong celibate, his correspondence revealed a series of passionate but unconsummated crushes on younger men, including Hugh Walpole, Hendrik Andersen and Morton Fullerton. In his 1996 biography of James, Sheldon M. Novick challenged this view, arguing that the young James had affairs in the 1870s with jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski. Less controversial is James’ lifelong friendship with fellow writer Edith Wharton, who he introduced his largely homosexual friendship circle, politely looking the other way when Wharton had an affair with Fullerton. James died in 1916, aged 72. Now recognised as a key transitional figure between the 19th-century realism and 20th-century literature, he has influenced contemporary gay writers including Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Tóibín. His baroque prose, labyrinthine sentences and moral ambiguities have been interpreted as expressions of his closeted sexuality. The critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued for gay subtext in James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which the male protagonist believes something “rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible” lies within him like a “beast in the jungle”, which prevents him from marrying. Many of his works have been adapted for the stage and screen, including Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, based on The Turn of the Screw, with a screenplay by Truman Capote; James Ivory and Ismail Merchant‘s films of The Europeans, The Bostonians and The Golden Bowl; Jane Campion’s feminist reworking of The Portrait of a Lady; Iain Softley’s sexually-charged The Wings of the Dove; and a modern-day version of What Maisie Knew. Tóibín’s 2004 novel The Master portrays James in disappointed middle age, retreating to Rye and repressing his sexual desires to focus on his writing.