Book Description
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.

This book is part of the American Political Thought series. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Concluding Volume of this Indispensable Biography
This is the third and concluding volume of Professor Samuels' Pulitzer Prize-winning, definitive biography of Henry Adams. The focus for this volume is the 1890-1918 period.Samuels' approach is what we used to refer to as an "intellectual biography."That is to say, he devotes at least as much space and attention to Adams' writings during this period as he does to the details of his life.This is to be expected since Samuels' [now Emeritus] taught English at Northwestern and has written extensively on Adams' works.This approach is particularly welcome during this period, for this is the span during which Adams writes his Education, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, his Tahitian histories, The Life of George Cabot Lodge, A Letter to American Teachers of History, and other works. The book was originally published in 1964, and of course much Adams' scholarship has flowed under the bridge in the interim.Particularly important in this regard is the three volume more recent biography by Edward Chalfant, which focuses more on Adams' personality and biographical details than his published writings.Nonetheless, Samuels holds up remarkably well despite its vintage. His biography continues to be the essential starting point for any serious student of that remarkable character of Lafayette Square, one Henry Brooks Adams. ... Read more

Book Description

"Education had ended in 1871, life was complete in 1890." With this paradoxical statement from The Education of Henry Adams, Adams apparently dismissed from the record twenty of the most interesting and active years of his career. Those two decades embraced the first great productive season of his literary genius and the most significant years of his emotional life. Opening on the highest note of expectation and closing with his desperate flight to the South Seas in 1890, a divided and lonely figure, that season of fulfillment and inner growth is the subject of this book.

The relationship between Adams' life and writings grew steadily richer as his literary artistry matured, and with that process as his main concern, Mr. Samuels has written a book equally rewarding as a biography and as a critical study. Perhaps the greatest achievement biographically is a definitive and absorbing account of the true relationship between Henry Adams and his wife and an introduction to the grand passion for Elizabeth Cameron which was to affect the rest of his life. The whole intense inner drama of his feelings is really opened up for the first time, as often as possible in his own words, to the tragedy of his wife's suicide, the embittered years of work concluding the great History, and, finally, the escape to the South Seas in an effort to overcome the intolerable intensity of his love for Mrs. Cameron.

Through detailed analyses of Adams' writings, Mr. Samuels shows how all this drama had its counterpoint in his literary activities and eventually became transformed into works of literary art. Equally interesting is the way in which the ideas for his biographical and historical writing emerged from the wide sources of his reading, were tested in the remarkable give and take of his circle, and finally adapted to the themes of his writing.

This is the most exhaustive biographical and critical study of Adams' middle years ever made, and probably answers, so far as it is humanly possible, every unanswered question about Adams' life and the writing of his books. From the wealth of family papers deposited with the Massachusetts Historical Society and numerous other sources, Mr. Samuels has unveiled an increasingly complex personality - a brilliant mind in the grip of many prejudices and contradictions, yet one so terrifyingly honest that it more than ever defies explanation in any ordinary terms.

The mass of fresh materials used includes letters from correspondents around the world and admits us to the other side of the enormous dialogue which Adams carried on with the members of his circle. Certain finds have revealed some invaluable sidelights including a striking fragment of Adams' diary for 1888-1889; a sheaf of his sonnets to Elizabeth Cameron, and the unpublished remainder of his letters to his wife. Much untouched material has also come to light in newspapers, magazines, public archives, court records, memoirs, and biographies.

This is the second of three volumes of Mr. Samuels' definitive study of Henry Adams. The other two are The Young Henry Adams and Henry Adams: The Major Phase.

Customer Reviews (2)

A lovely, simple biography of a forgotten woman...sad
A very well written, easy-to-read biography for those interested in Henry Adams's wife, who committed suicide amidst the wealth and finery of her husband's successful career. Very interesting story. Wonderful book!

Excellent bibliography
This book (which began life as a dissertation) will very much interest women's history buffs and students of American literature but is less likely to please physicians or students of abnormal psychology. Clover Hooper comes out of a Boston family almost as intriguing as that of the Adams. She is one of Henry James' ideal American girls, and might have become James' wife had he been inclined to marry. She maintained a glittering establishment while Henry Adams was in Washington, and many of her points of view are reflected in The Education of Henry Adams. Clover's father was her closest intellectual companion and when he died, in her mid 30s, she fell into a depression and within a few months had committed suicide. The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams was published in the late 1970s and includes as complete a bibliography, to that time, as one could wish, including a reference to Susan Phinney Conrad's witty Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Power and Order
The naturalist tradition in American fiction was a product of the tremedous changes wrought in the late nineteenth-century America by the development of science and technology and by the intellectual upheavals associated with the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This book is an account of naturalism, perhaps the strongetst and most influential intellectual tradition - or, as Harold Kaplan would argue, mythology - to affect modern American literature and culture.

Kaplan approaches the naturalist writers through a study of Henry Adams. He sees in Adams the paradigmatic intelligence of his time - a prophetic mind, through not a seminal one - and a man absorbed with the twin notions of power and order. Adam's major work illustrates the joining of a literary imagination and moral temperment with an almost obsessive response to the science, economic life, and politics of his world. Adam's work exemplifies what Kaplan calls the myth of metapolitics - a view of human struggle and fate profoundly dominated by naturalist concepts of power.

Kaplan then turns to the fascination that power in its various manifestations - material, moral, social, political - held for writers such as Dreiser, Norris, Crane, and others. Their dramatic plots, characters, and allegorical images are examined in detail, and Kaplan sees them pervaded by themes of redemptive apocalyptic modes of viewing history and the future - all legacies of the naturalist ethos.

Historians of the ideas, politics, literature, and society of post- Civil War America will find in Kaplan's book an integrated discussion of the period's dominant ideology and of the works of it's important writers, Henry Adams in particular. In wider reference, this book should concern all those who are interested in the problems of modern ethics and politics in the effort to harmonize concepts of value with images of power and natural order.
--- from book's dustjacket ... Read more