Last year an item appeared on the Internet list devoted to the Jameses asking about great teachers of Henry James. My first reaction to the question was that I had never had a great teacher of James; though I have written a dissertation, articles, conference papers, and a book about Henry James, I had never had a course on James. I did read Washington Square in high school, but that experience had little effect on my later interest in James. In college I read The Ambassadors in a course in American fiction (now that I think back on it, I realize how ambitious the professor was to assign this long, complex novel), and I was very interested by the novel, but not enough to further explore James’s writing. And the instructor, Sidney Kaplan, a respected early champion of African-American literature, was never particularly known as a Jamesian.