T HE only major work by Henry James that has not been reprinted is his biography of an American sculptor, William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries and Recollections (1903). Neither a critical nor a financial failure when it first appeared, the book has since been dismissed by even the most ardent Jacobites as a regrettable expenditure of the Master's talent on a longforgotten figure in the history of nineteeth-century American art. The interest the biography is able to generate centers on its skill in developing a trifling subject into a work of art. Story himself, as James took pains to make clear, was merely the point of origin for a Jamesian expansion of consciousness which spreads far from its nominal center to encompass a generation of American expatriates in Italy. William Wetmore Story, the son of Justice Joseph Story of the United States Supreme Court, was, like his father, a brilliant scholar of the law, and he published a number of important works which went through several editions. When Justice Story died in 1846, his son wrote his biography. Since the younger Story had already tried his hand at sculpture, as well as other arts, he was also commissioned to design a memorial statue of Justice Story, completed in 1855, for Mount Auburn Cemetery. He first visited Rome in 1848, studied sculpture, and returned to Boston in 1851. After two more trips to Rome, he settled there permanently in 1856. Following a long and successful career as a sculptor, poet, and essayist, he died in Italy in 1895.