William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

Robert D. Richardson. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Who was William James? Was he a stream of life or a stream of thoughts? Was he a dazzling and too often overstrained assemblage of experiences ever rushing past? Or was he a series of profound thoughts, impressive theories, and important books still widely read more than one hundred years later? William James was, of course, all these things. But to which William James would James himself have given priority? Robert D. Richardson notes in his new biography that "James did not believe in the existence of ideas apart from the men and women who held them" (155). William James the thinker, James himself would have insisted, was a product of the process of William James the life.