Hawthorne was of crucial importance as the only previous writer of stature James knew of who had shown how American psychological experience could be treated in imaginative literature. Hawthorne was as important to James as he had been earlier to Melville, even though the novels of James and Melville have extremely different orientations. In his critical biography Hawthorne, James makes an implicit comparison between himself and Hawthorne, whose notation of the actual world around him was vague because he was not absorbed by it, as James was. James`s relationship to Hawthorne was thus complex and many-sided and involved both close kinship and essential conflict, affinity and dissent, agreement and disavowal, the psychological chords struck by Hawthorne are sounded again by James. The individual`s selfhood has unusual importance in Hawthorne, as it does again in James. As American writers, Hawthorne and James have many similarities; their fiction, continually interested in moral problems, has an extraordinary delicacy. Especially in assimilating The Bilthedale Romance into The Bostonians, to underscore themes he shared with Hawthorne, James also made Hawthorne`s material reflect his own more worldly attitudes-his sense of the limitations of the New England mind, his concern with manners, and the possibilities of aesthetic enrichment represented for him much more by Italy than by Boston. The difference between Hawthorne`s novel and James`s, however, is the difference between Hawthorne`s “shadows and confusions” and James`s lucid social relationships, which have been made possible by exposure to a larger culture than Hawthorne had at his disposal, In conclusion, the altered form of literary traditionality reflects James`s inauguration of not just a different way of writing but a different way of thinking about the kind of work. The historical drama of James`s career, as I read it, lies in his reconstruction, eventually of the practice of the novelist`s work. Especially I suggest that in the course of James`s reorganization of influence his pride and prejudice strongly and repeatedly intervene in his consciousness and cosmopolitan mind formation. The reaction of James`s cosmopolitan intelligence upon Hawthorne`s powerfully archetypal mind eventually helps to demonstrate how the American psychological tradition came into being in the nineteenth-century.