James's main work is novels, and he also wrote many literary reviews, travel notes, biographies and plays. His novels often write about the communication between Americans and Europeans; How the sins of adults affect and destroy pure and intelligent children; The contradiction between matter and spirit; The loneliness of artists, the life of writers and artists, and so on. This shows the author's strong interest in personal moral quality.
James's works include the novels An American, Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, Wings of a Dove, The Messenger, The Golden Bowl and so on. Short stories include daisy miller, Aspen Manuscripts, turn of the screw, The Beast in the Jungle, and a group of short stories describing the lives of writers and artists, such as Objects and Patterns on the Carpet. James has written many insightful commentary articles involving writers from Britain, America and France, such as George Eliot, Stevenson, anthony trollope, Hawthorne, Emerson, Balzac, george sand, Flaubert and Turgenev. There are three autobiographies: Childhood and Others, Being a Son and Brother and Middle Age.
Henry James pioneered psychoanalytic novels. In his works, the inner world of ordinary people appears like a maze. In The Wings of a Dove (1902), he explored the "most subtle and hazy" thoughts and feelings of the characters and transformed the "beating pulse in space" into an image.
At the beginning of the 20th century, James published three novels one after another: Wings of Pigeons, Envoys and Golden Bowl, which made his creation reach its peak. Among the 20th century 100 English novels selected by Random House (1996), James is on the list with these three novels, and all of them are among the best. Most of these novels praise the noble character of the American bourgeoisie. They are basically based on the subtle inner activities of the characters, and sometimes they are tedious and seem obscure. James's other works include The Bostonian, Princess Casamasima, The American and The Treasure of Boynton. In addition to novels, he also wrote some important literary reviews, plays, travel notes and so on. James is regarded as the pioneer of modern western psychoanalytic novels.