He was also known for his extensive letter writing and being a friend of the famous, Malcolm Cowley once remarked to Stern, "My God, you've known everybody, his wife, his boyfriend, and his natural issue!
"[1] The son of a British cavalry officer of Jewish descent and an Anglo-Irish Protestant mother, Stern was born in County Meath, Ireland, and educated at Wixenford School in the south of England.
His fiction includes The Heartless Land (1932); Something Wrong (1938); The Man who was Loved (1952); The Stories of James Stern (1969) and some unpublished family memoirs A Silver Spoon.
He famously wrote a satirical review of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in the New York Times entitled "Aw, the World's a Crumby Place".
Among them were Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Brian Howard, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller, whose A View from the Bridge was dedicated to Stern.