While the novelist Henry James never formed a permanent relationship with a single individual, in the last decades of his life he increasingly formed passionate attachments to younger men of diverse talents and traits. Dearly Beloved Friends collects carefully edited texts of an ample selection of the writer's personal and often intimate letters -- many of them long withheld from publication -- to four of those men: the sculptor Hendrik Andersen (1872-1940), the dilettante Dudley Jocelyn Persse (1873-1943), and the writers Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920) and Sir Hugh Walpole (1884-1941). These letters reveal the humourous, warm side of the literary "Master," and document as never before the depth and eroticism of his love for a number of his friends. Witty, poignant, and passionate, the letters reveal a man in full control of both his rhetoric and his relationships.

Susan E. Gunter is Professor of English, Westminster College.Steven H. Jobe is Associate Professor of English, Hanover College.