Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was a North American literary critic and biographer. Though he wrote on James Joyce (James Joyce: The Last Journey, 1947) and on the Bloomsbury group, his lifework is summed up in his five-volume biography of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972), which epitomizes biography as a literary form, a subject he had discussed in Literary Biography (1957), and enfolds a subjective author's self-perceptions into his literary output. Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1963. Edel enjoyed privileged access to letters and documents from James' life housed in the Widener Library at Harvard University, after gaining the blessing of members of James' family.

More than a deft abridgment of Edel's classic, prize-winning five-volume James biography, this is an updated, partially rewritten version of it. Inclusive of new source material and without some of the "reticences" regarding James's passional life, it is essentially a new book. Into the outer story of James's lifethe early American years; the "passionate pilgrimages" to France and Italy; the friendships with many of Europe's preeminent writers, Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, R. L. Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad and H. G. Wells among them; the disastrous failure in the theater; and the horror of World War I. Edel weaves with perfect literary tact the inner story, that of the developing mind of a writer he calls the first of the psychological novelists and America's "one fully achieved literary artist," together with sensitive analyses of the novels. We see this most active contemplative, most subtle observer of human emotion, most dedicated pursuer of his craft in his imaginative workshop; and Edel indeed catches, to quote one of his innumerable telling phrases, something of "the radiance of his powerful artistry.