Henry Adams, Selected Letters
Henry Adams, Selected Letters

Author: Henry Adams

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 9780674387577

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Ernest Samuels's Pulitzer Prize-winning, multi-volume work on Henry Adams is now a compact, updated, one-volume biography. Henry Adams has been called an indispensable figure in American thought. Although he famously "took his own life" in the autobiographical Education of Henry Adams, his letters--more intimate and unbuttoned, though hardly unselfconscious--are themselves indispensable for an understanding of the man and his times. This selection, the first based on the authoritative 6-volume Letters, represents every major private and public event in Adams's life from 1858 to 1918 and confirms his reputation as one of the greatest letter writers of his time. Adams knew everyone who was anyone and went almost everywhere, and--true to the Adams family tradition--recorded it all. These letters to an array of correspondents from American presidents to Henry James to 5-year-old honorary nieces reveal Adams's passion for politics and disdain for politicians, his snobbish delight in society and sincere affection for friends, his pose of dilettantism and his serious ambitions as writer and historian, his devastation at his wife's suicide and his acquiescence in the role of Elizabeth Cameron's "tame cat," his wicked humor at others' expense and his own reflexive self-depreciation. This volume allows the reader to experience 19th-century America through the eyes of an observer on whom very little was lost, and to make the acquaintance of one of the more interesting personalities in American letters. As Ernest Samuels says in his introduction, "The letters lift the veil of old-age disenchantment that obscures the Education and exhibit Adams as perhaps the most brilliant letter writer of his time. What most engages one in the long course of his correspondence is the tireless range of his intellectual curiosity, his passionate effort to understand the politics, the science, and the human society of the world as it changed around him... It is as literature of a high order that his letters can finally be read."

The Last American Aristocrat
The Last American Aristocrat

Author: David S. Brown

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-11-24

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1982128259

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A “marvelous…compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation. Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these powerful men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. “Thoroughly researched and gracefully written” (The Wall Street Journal), The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Offering a fresh window on nineteenth century US history, as well as a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before, The Last American Aristocrat is a “standout portrait of the man and his era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Henry Adams
Henry Adams

Author: James P. Young

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2021-10-08

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0700631828

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Henry Adams has been a neglected figure in recent years. The Education of Henry Adams is widely accepted as a classic of American letters, but his other work is little read except by specialists. His brilliant journalism is out of print, while Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and the novels Democracy and Esther receive little attention. Even the monumental History of the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, considered by some to be the greatest history written by any American, seems noticed only by scholars of that period. James P. Young, author of the highly regarded Reconsidering American Liberalism, seeks to revive interest in the thought of Adams by extracting core ideas from his writings concerning both American political development and the course of world history and then showing their relevance to the contemporary longing for a democratic revival. In this revisionist study, Young denies that Adams was a reactionary critic of democracy and instead contends that he was an idealistic, though often disappointed, advocate of representative government. Young focuses on Adams's belief that capitalist industrial development during the Gilded Age had debased American ideals and then turns to a careful study of Adams's famous contrast of the unity of medieval society with the fragmentation of modern technological society. Though fully aware of Adams's concerns about technology, Young rejects the idea that Adams was bitterly opposed to twentieth century developments in that field. He shows that though a liberal democrat with inclinations toward reform, Adams is much too sophisticated to be captured by any simple label.

Henry Adams and the Making of America
Henry Adams and the Making of America

Author: Garry Wills

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2007-08

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 9780618872664

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Bestselling author Wills showcases Henry Adams little-known but seminal studyof the early United States, and draws from it fresh insights on the paradoxesthat roil America to this day.

The Education of Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams

Author: Henry Adams

Publisher: Standard Ebooks

Published: 2022-10-04T17:27:17Z

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13:

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One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

The Selected Letters of Henry Adams
The Selected Letters of Henry Adams

Author: Henry Adams

Publisher:

Published: 1951

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Henry Adams has been called an indispensable figure in American thought. Although he famously "took his own life" in the autobiographical Education of Henry Adams, his letters--more intimate and unbuttoned, though hardly unselfconscious--are themselves indispensable for an understanding of the man and his times. This selection represents every major private and public event in Adams's life from 1858 to 1918 and confirms his reputation as one of the greatest letter writers of his time. Adams knew everyone who was anyone and went almost everywhere, and--true to the Adams family tradition--recorded it all. These letters to an array of correspondents reveal Adams's passion for politics and disdain for politicians, his snobbish delight in society and sincere affection for friends, his pose of dilettantism and his serious ambitions as writer and historian, his devastation at his wife's suicide and his acquiescence in the role of Elizabeth Cameron's "tame cat," his wicked humor at others' expense and his own reflexive self-depreciation. This volume allows the reader to experience 19th-century America through the eyes of an observer on whom very little was lost, and to make the acquaintance of one of the more interesting personalities in American letters. What most engages one in the long course of his correspondence is the tireless range of his intellectual curiosity, his passionate effort to understand the politics, the science, and the human society of the world as it changed around him... It is as literature of a high order that his letters can finally be read.

Democracy
Democracy

Author: Henry Adams

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1775419118

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Originally published anonymously, it was later revealed that this classic work of political fiction was penned by Henry Brooks Adams, the renowned essayist and journalist best known for the autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Though fictionalized, Democracy: An American Novel offers a gripping account of the vagaries and vicissitudes of political power that still rings true more than a century after it was first published.