The Epic of America was published by Little, Brown in 1931, at the depth of the Great Depression — a timing that proved crucial to its reception. Adams’s narrative of American history as the progressive realization of a dream of equality and opportunity resonated powerfully with a nation that was questioning whether the promise of America had failed.
The book coined the phrase “the American Dream” — or at least gave it the currency that made it a permanent part of the national vocabulary. Adams defined the Dream not as the pursuit of wealth (the interpretation that would later dominate) but as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” — a vision of social mobility and democratic equality rather than mere material accumulation.
Adams was not an academic historian but an independent scholar — a Wall Street broker who had retired to write history — and his prose reflected this background: clear, engaging, accessible to general readers, and free from the apparatus of academic scholarship. The book sold extraordinarily well and remained in print for decades, becoming one of the standard popular histories of the United States alongside the works of Charles and Mary Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and later Daniel Boorstin.
The book’s significance is partly historical (it shaped how Americans thought about their own history) and partly linguistic (the phrase “American Dream” became one of the defining concepts of the twentieth century, used by politicians, advertisers, and cultural critics in ways that both extended and distorted Adams’s original meaning).
Collecting The Epic of America
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1931): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $15–$40
- Later editions: $5–$15