It was praised by Cynthia Ozick for presenting its subject with all “the sensuous immediacy of his quotidian reality: the rooms he lived in, the streets he trod, and the very texture of his inmost sensibility….
In Gorra's ingenious and capacious reading, James stands before us with a clarity of seeing and feeling given to no previous biographer.” [1] His other books include The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990), an account of British fiction in the generation of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, which began as a doctoral thesis at Stanford University, where it won the English Department’s Alden Dissertation Prize.
It was followed by a study of the postcolonial novel, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997), and The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004), which grew out of a sabbatical year spent in that country.
[2] Other honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship for his first year's work on Portrait of a Novel.
[4] At Smith College, Gorra’s classes concentrate on fiction from the nineteenth century to the present day, including courses on the contemporary novel, Faulkner, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.