Product Description

'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams,' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.'

His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors—great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams—Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War.

Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author&'s death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age.

With an introduction by renowned historian Edmund Morris.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #408843 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-11
• Released on: 1999-05-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Amazon.com
Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.

It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told,

revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.

Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.

Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.

He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus

Alfred Kazin
"The pleasure of reading The Education is the pleasure of seeing history come alive."

About the Author
Edmund Morris is an historian and author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris.

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Customer Reviews

The greatest non-fiction book?
I was intrigued by this book because it is almost universally considered to be the best non-fiction book ever written. I went into the book with an open mind and eagerness but ultimately found myself a bit disappointed.

Henry Adams was a member of the preeminent American Adams family (John and John Quincy were his great-grandfather and grandfather). Henry's autobiography follows his uniquely privileged life from childhood through old age as Henry witnesses (and always comments on) the ever-changing American experience and perpetually seeks to refine and further his understanding of the world around him. This relentless pursuit of "education" is the connective theme within the autobiography, as Henry continually considers and reconsiders the rapid scientific, technological, economic and political changes that swept through America and the world during his life. Ultimately, through these experiences and reflections, Henry comes to important conclusions about the role of education, learning and life experiences.

This book is filled with historical references and names from Henry's time period, making the book fascinating for someone who is interested in that period (mid 19th to early 20th Centuries). I personally did not find these references interesting and in several cases, I felt confused or lost because I completely missed important references. The strength of the book is Henry's always sharp observation and clever wit.

I think this would be a great book for those interested in Henry's time period or for those interested more broadly in American history. As someone with only peripheral interests in these areas, I found the book to be a little bit out of my league. People interested in this historical period will find this book quite rewarding though don't read it simply because it is supposed to be great-- for that would be an affront to Henry's belief in self-motivated education.

Philosophical Inquiries at Scientific Change
Henry Adams grew up having numerous opportunities available, yet a limited perspective inherited of politically viewing these perspectives from an unbiased, alternative point of view. However, he was far ahead of his time as he didn't allow the constraints of his traditional, plain vanilla, New England raised, Harvard educated upbrining get in his way of addressing what really matters to being happy, satisfied, contempt in 19th century American society.

This book is many things: as he himself referred to a search of meaningful truth through education that could be utilized in the long-term and is not brushed under the carpet after it's application for a particular task has been deemed unnecessary; a search for inner and outer spiritual balance and connectedness with the past, present, and unknowable future in an age of rapid change, discovery, and industrial transformation; and finally the importance of having gratitude and honoring born-out priveleges, while seeking to expand one's intellectual and social horizons and affiliations.

The analogy to the mechanistic dynamo and his educational interpretation of needing to brede scientifically minded, evolution espousing mathematical minds and his other whimsical social inferences have proved prophetic and were way ahead of his time. From his ruminations on the unique cultural differences toward the work-play ethic of Germany, France, Italy, and England , to his analysis of the ill-founded corrupt Grant and Reconstruction era Presidencies, to the evolution of the diplomatist's political importance and stature, and finally whether his life truly added something significant to himself and society, Adams is a philosophical genius listening and taking it all in as his world vastly changes and transforms itself on a locomotive train ride. In the end he found education through the traditional means of the textbook and teacher-pupil method successful if adapted toward science and technology, but inadequate as only experience and traveling brought on the proper perspective and long-term balanced outlook for an individual. These conclusive findings is the primary reason to read this philosophically inquisitive book, as many of the other's thought processes and findings bear strong truths to today's hustle-n-bustle lifestyle.

One of the most boring books I've ever read
I acquired this book in high school or college and never read it. I kept it around because it appears on lists of must read books. God knows why, the footnotes are an interesting chronology of american history but Adam's false humility, while name-dropping references to art, literature, economics,politics, statesmen,etc. but never discussing any of these areas becomes extremely tedious. I struggled through to the end but never could discover a reason to read the book or a reason why the book is touted so highly as necessary to be truly "educated". Adams, himself, would have been a fascinating person to know but he is a collossal bore to read.