As we know, these prefaces were themselves collected and became his irreplaceable book, The Art of the Novel, which can be seen, among other ways, as an extraordinarily useful book on matters of craft, though the Master would no doubt spin, no doubt with formal elegance, in his grave at the thought that it might be thought of in such prosaic, tool-kit terms. To each of them he also added a preface describing the germ of the idea and the formal questions he addressed as he worked from conception to completion. With the contract signed, he set out on what became a four-year long literary labor, a meticulous line-by-line reconsideration of the eighteen books he chose to include. He decided, in honor of the city of his birth, to call the works as selected and collected the New York Edition. In 1905, at the height of his reputation, Henry James happily accepted the invitation of his American publisher, Scribner, to bring out a definitive edition of his books. if nothing else, keep handy the idea when you're stuggling with your work that "many great writers stumble over something a hack can do with ease." If we stumble over enough, might we not count ourselves geniuses?
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