The Correspondence of William James v. 4; 1856-1877

This fourth volume of a projected twelve begins a new series: William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues. The 309 letters in this volume start when William James was fourteen and on his second trip abroad and conclude when he was thirty-five, negotiating with the president of Johns Hopkins University about a course he had been invited to teach on the relation between mind and body. William James's correspondence in these twenty years deals with everything from his protracted search for a vocation to his recurrent physical and emotional problems. The letters range from his relations with family and friends to his irregular education to his odd - one might say Jamesian - courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens and reveal his developing views on art, morality, politics, women, medicine, philosophy, science, religion, national character, the Civil War, the South, Americans abroad, and other writers and thinkers. They are witness to his growth into adulthood and the price he paid for that growth. William James's teenage letters reveal an adolescent amazingly charming and precocious who displayed from the beginning the promise of his maturity: witty, self-assured, and discerning. His letters simply dance with delight at the world around him. Packed with commentary, much of it considered and trenchant, the letters give us a young William James in the round, brilliantly.