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After his first story, an anonymous tale entitled "A Tragedy of Error," was published, Henry devoted himself to writing. He got a job as a book reviewer in the North American Review, and published another story, "The Story of the Year," under his own name in 1865. Perhaps more importantly, Henry made several influential friends at this time, particularly William Dean Howells. Howells was the editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, which would publish many of Henry's writings and reviews.
In 1869 Henry traveled to Europe alone, paying his way by contributing essays and reviews to several American magazines. In England he met William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, George Eliot, and many others. He traveled on to Switzerland, and then Rome, before returning home in 1870.
The next year, the Atlantic Monthly began serializing Henry's fist novel, Watch and Ward. He quickly grew bored with American life, however, and Henry's parents allowed him to chaperone his sister, Alice, through Europe. So, in 1872, Henry again set out for Europe, with Alice and their Aunt Kate. Alice was frequently ill, and Aunt Kate disliked Europe, so the two women returned to Boston almost immediately. Henry stayed for a further 2 years, supporting himself again by writing for American Magazines.
Presumably inheriting some of his father's wanderlust, Henry decided to return to American in1874. Merely a year later he made a decision to permanently settle in paris, and sailed without even waiting for the publication of his first work in novel form, Roderick Hudson. In Paris, he met many of the leading artists and writers of the day: Ivan Turgenev considered James something of a protege. James became friends with Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and others who would distinctly affect the tone and style of his writing.
Still, he felt that he was an outsider in Paris, and so in 1876 he moved to London where he published The American, considered to be his first great books. James turned out to be quite a success in London: he became friends with Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson and William Gladstone; he was invited to join one of the city's most exclusive clubs; he reported that he dined out on 109 times during the winter of 1879 alone. During his residency in London, Henry published several stories, most notably the novella Daisy Miller, based on an anecdote told to him by friend Alice Bartlett, and the novel Washington Square, based on an anecdote told to him by actress Fanny Kemble. In 1881, Henry moved to Venice, where he wrote The Portrait of a Lady, which was serialized by Howells in the Atlantic Monthly.
Despite Henry's happiness with his European life, he decided to return to America for an extended visit in 1881. He visited his parents in Boston, and then traveled down to Washington. While in Washington, he learned that his mother was critically ill: he rushed back north but arrived after her death. Grieving, he moved to a house on Boston's Beacon Hill and wrote a play based on "Daisy Miller" for which he could find no New York producer.
He had barely returned to London when he received word that his father was ill: once again, Henry was too late, arriving the day after his father was buried. Shortly after returning to Europe in 1883, he found out that his brother Garth Wilkinson had died, as had Henry's good friend Turgenev. Despite this string of bad fortune, James was finding a good deal of literary success. In 1883, the Macmillan company published a fourteen volume set of his novels and stories, traveling extensively through Europe, and writing. In 1886, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima were published, but neither was a critical success as the wary press was afraid to sanction revolutionary motives.
The following years were probably the darkest of Henry's career. Despite his lack of success with the play Daisy Miller, he decided to try his hand at theater. The American was a provincial success, but found no favor with the London critics and lasted only 70 nights, despite the publicity generated by the attendance of the Prince of Wales. An original play, Disengaged, was designed and cast but never performed, and so Henry placed all his hopes in his dramatic version of Guy Domville. Despite being a critical success, the play was an immediate failure, James was booed off of the stage after the first performance. The play lasted only a month, until Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest could be hurried into production. Incidentally, the run on that play had also to be cut short, due to Wilde's legal problems, and Henry could barely contain his glee when he heard the news.
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