WM & H'RY

A fascinating exploration of the relationship - intimate, erudite, often antagonistic - between the two famous brothers, based on their correspondence of over eight hundred letters.

Readers generally know only one of the two famous James brothers. Literary types know Henry James; psychologists, philosophers, and religion scholars know William James. In reality, the brothers’ minds were inseparable, as the more than eight hundred letters they wrote to each other reveal.
In this book, J. C. Hallman mines the letters for mutual affection and influence, painting a moving portrait of a relationship between two extraordinary men. Deeply intimate, sometimes antagonistic, rife with wit, and on the cutting edge of art and science, the letters portray the brothers’ relationship and measure the manner in which their dialogue helped shape, through the influence of their literary and intellectual output, the philosophy, science, and literature of the century that followed.

J.C. Hallman studied creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh. He was accepted to the celebrated Iowa Writers’ Workshop at twenty-one, at the time one of the youngest writers ever admitted to the program. He graduated in 1991 and began publishing short fiction shortly thereafter. He later graduated from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He has published a variety of fiction and nonfiction in publications ranging from The Believer and Tin House, to Bookforum and GQ, to Salon and Bookslut. He received a Michener Fellowship and a McKnight Artist Grant. He recently won a Pushcart Prize and has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2010 (ed. Bill Buford). He is the author of The Chess Artist (St. Martin’s, 2003), The Devil is a Gentleman (Random House, 2006), In Utopia (St. Martin’s, 2010), The Hospital for Bad Poets (Milkweed, 2009), and also the forthcoming B&Me (Simon & Schuster, 2013). Publisher's Weekly have compared him to Alain de Botton, the Los Angeles Times, to Kafka, and the Financial Times, to Hunter S. Thompson.