Every sentence has a purpose, every scene a place in the whole. Notwithstanding James’s reputation for overworking his material-“he chewed more than he bit off,” goes the famous complaint-you never have the feeling that he is wasting the reader’s time. But they do share one characteristic with the mature classics: the obvious care with which they were constructed. There is plenty of plot-if anything, they tend toward the melodramatic-along with a good deal of humor. They are recognizably nineteenth-century comedies of manners, written in a relatively straightforward style.

These books might surprise some readers who know James only by reputation, or from working to untangle the baroque sentences of one of his late masterpieces in a college English course. The first volume of the Library of America collection contains two curiosities (“Watch and Ward,” which I’m not sure I’d even heard of before, and “Confidence,” which is enjoyable but slight) and three great novels (“Roderick Hudson,” “The American,” and “The Europeans”). My solution to the quandary was to start at the beginning. But this only complicated matters, because he left out some of his best work, including “Washington Square.” James himself tried to address the problem late in life, with the revised “New York Edition” of his writing. Once you’ve gotten beyond the bright constellation of the major works, it can be hard to know where to go with James’s writing there’s so much of it, and no one seems to agree on what’s what. But I knew him less well than any other figure in my personal canon. I had always considered James one of my favorite writers, largely on the basis of a few long novels (“The Portrait of a Lady,” “The Ambassadors”) and short stories (“The Aspern Papers,” “The Figure in the Carpet”).

It took me a couple of years, and I didn’t undertake it in an especially devoted or systematic way. I’m a sucker for completist projects, but this one came about more or less by accident. A few weeks ago, I finished reading the Library of America’s six-volume, sixty-eight-hundred-page edition of the novels of Henry James.

The american by henry james