Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

HENRY ADAMS, essayist, historian, novelist, and autobiographer, was born in Boston in 1838, a great-grandson of the second president of the United States, John Adams, and grandson of the sixth, John Quincy Adams. He graduated from Harvard in 1858 and later studied in Europe, where he also worked as private secretary to his father, then minister to England. He was professor of history at Harvard from 1870 to 1877 and editor of the North American Review. He moved permanently to Washington in 1877 to begin work on a biography of Albert Gallatin, an American statesman, and what would become a nine-volume History of the United States under the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, published between 1885 and 1891. He also published two novels: Democracy (1880) and Esther (1884). Following the death of his wife in 1885, he began to make annual trips to Europe, especially France, until the beginning of the First World War; he also travelled widely in the Far East and Caribbean. In 1904 his narrative of medieval churches and culture, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, appeared to great acclaim; in 1907 The Education of Henry Adams was privately printed and circulated among friends including Henry James and President Theodore Roosevelt. In September 1918, six months after Adamss death, the Education appeared in a trade edition; it was widely reviewed, became a bestseller, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.

IRA B. NADEL is the author of Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form (1984), Joyce and the Jews (1989), and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996). He has also edited The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins for Oxford Worlds Classics (1997) and The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1998). He is professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

HENRY ADAMS

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
IRA B. NADEL

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editorial material Ira B. Nadel 1999

First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback in 1999

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I must know whether America is right or wrong.

I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. (LA 3940)

The voice is not Henry Adamss but the explanation is. The vexed question about America is put by Madeleine Lee, the heroine of Adamss popular novel of 1880, Democracy; the reply is by John Carrington, a fictitious Washington observer of the political scene. But it could just as easily be Adams in the Education or in his History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. As a journalist, historian, novelist, and autobiographer, Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment, testing a statement offered by another figure in Democracy: You Americans believe yourselves to be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience (LA 378).