Henry Adams Books

Easton Press Henry Adams books:
The Education of Henry Adams - 1970

Franklin Library Henry Adams books:
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1978
The Education of Henry Adams - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1980
The Education of Henry Adams - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1982
The Education of Henry Adams - 20th Century's Greatest Books - 1982
The Education of Henry Adams - Pulitzer Prize Classics - 1983

The Education of Henry Adams (1906) contrasts 19th century disunity with medieval unity. He argues, through a review of his own experience, that religion, art, and science have gone their separate ways, disorganizing the human spirit. The spiritual force once concentrated in the cult of the virgin has been transformed in modern times into the nonhuman force of motor energy, symbolized by the dynamo. The Education of Henry Adams, an autobiography in the third person, is written with detached skepticism and delicate irony. The style itself is ironical, for one of his main concerns in the work is to indict the formal educational system of his day for its failure to prepare an intelligent man for the chaos of modern life. 

The work records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in early old age, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize.

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is a record not of a literal jouney but of a meditative journey across time and space into the medieval imagination. Using the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of the two locales as a starting point, Adams breathes life into what others might see merely as monuments of a past civilization. With daring and inventive conceits, Adams looks at the ordinary people, places, and events in the context of the social conventions and systems of thought and belief of the thirteenth century turning the study of history into a kind of theater.As Raymond Carney discusses in his introduction, Adams' freeedom from the European traditions of study lends an exuberance and puckish wit to his writings.