A short life of the author
Henry Adams was the most intellectually brilliant and the most tormented American writer of the Gilded Age — a man who was born into the most distinguished family in American history (great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, son of the ambassador to Britain during the Civil War), who possessed every advantage that birth, education, and connection could provide, and who spent his life convinced that none of it was sufficient to understand the forces that were transforming the modern world. His autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, is universally regarded as the greatest American autobiography — a work whose formal innovation (it is written in the third person), whose intellectual range (it encompasses history, science, philosophy, and art), and whose magnificent prose style place it among the supreme achievements of American letters.
The Adams Dynasty
Henry Brooks Adams was born in Boston in 1838, the fourth generation of the most remarkable family in American public life. His great-grandfather John Adams had been the second President; his grandfather John Quincy Adams had been the sixth; his father, Charles Francis Adams, was Lincoln’s ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War — a position of critical diplomatic importance. Henry served as his father’s private secretary in London during the war years, an experience that gave him an education in international diplomacy and an intimate knowledge of power that no university could have provided.
He attended Harvard (class of 1858), traveled in Europe, and returned to Washington, where he worked as a journalist before accepting a position as professor of medieval history at Harvard (1870–1877) and editor of the North American Review. He was an excellent teacher — his students included Henry Cabot Lodge — but he found academic life confining and resigned to pursue independent scholarship.
The History
Adams’s nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891) was the most ambitious and most accomplished work of American historical scholarship in the nineteenth century. The work combined narrative power with analytical depth, and its treatment of the Jefferson and Madison presidencies — encompassing the Louisiana Purchase, the Embargo, the War of 1812, and the transformation of Jeffersonian republicanism — remains authoritative.
Democracy and Esther
Adams published two novels anonymously: Democracy (1880) and Esther (1884). Democracy was a sardonic portrait of Washington political life, centered on a Senator who is transparently modelled on James G. Blaine. The novel was a bestseller, and its authorship remained a subject of speculation for years. Esther was a more personal novel about a woman’s struggle with religious doubt. Neither novel is a major work of fiction, but both reveal the satirical intelligence and moral seriousness that characterise all of Adams’s writing.
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904, privately printed; 1913, public edition) was Adams’s most beautiful book — a meditation on twelfth- and thirteenth-century French civilisation as embodied in its architecture, particularly the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel and the cathedral of Chartres. The book argued that medieval civilisation had achieved a unity of thought, feeling, and faith — centred on the cult of the Virgin Mary — that modern civilisation had lost. It was a work of historical imagination rather than conventional scholarship, and its prose — lyrical, precise, deeply felt — is some of the finest in American literature.
The Education
The Education of Henry Adams was privately printed in 1907 and published posthumously in 1918, winning the Pulitzer Prize. Written in the third person — “Henry Adams” is treated as a character rather than a self — the book is an account of a nineteenth-century mind attempting to understand the forces of the twentieth century: the dynamo, the new physics, the concentration of economic power, the acceleration of historical change.
The book’s most famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” contrasted the power of the medieval Virgin Mary (the force that built Chartres) with the power of the modern dynamo (the force that was transforming the world through electricity), and argued that the substitution of mechanical force for spiritual force represented a crisis of civilisation whose consequences Adams could sense but not predict.
Collecting Adams
The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed, 1907, 100 copies) is one of the great rarities of American book collecting. The trade first edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1918) is the standard collecting edition. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed, 1904; Houghton Mifflin, 1913) is also sought. Democracy (Henry Holt, 1880) is collected as an anonymous first edition. The nine-volume History (Scribner’s, 1889–1891) is a major set. Adams’s letters — published in several editions — are among the finest in American literature and are collected for their literary quality.