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 … 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).
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This is a must read for students of the nineteenth century. Henry Adams, an educator and journalist is the subject, and the author uses Adams own writings to anchor the book. It reveals much about the intellectual awakening of the nineteenth century. It is a bit like the story about whatever happened to John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
Henry Adams was born in 1838, the year the telegraph was first demonstrated. Native Americans were forced to relocate and the Underground Railroad was being established. Meanwhile in Britain, slavery was abolished, Victoria was newly on the throne, and Dickens published Oliver Twist. Adams died in 1918 during WWI, the year of the Spanish Influenza and the first time airplanes were used by the USPS.
Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, ‘the Governor’ of Henry’s childhood, and the great-grandson of founding father President John Adams. His own father Charles Francis had served as ambassador to England, as had generations of Adams men.
Unlike his predecessors, Adams did not committ his life to public service. He never had children and his wife committed suicide when he was in his late 40s. He spent some time teaching at Harvard, and was popular with the students, but it did not suit him.
Henry became a historian, a world traveler, and an insider Washingtonian socialite.
It was his book The Education of Henry Adams that introduced me to him. It is a strange book, self-published and shared with his friends. He writes about his childhood in Quincy and his later life, skipping the death of his wife and his most regarded histories. He writes about the changes in society, the rise of capitalists and industry and the power of money.
Like his predecessors, Henry was intellectual, high-minded, and could be contrary. Like his predecessors, he believed one should be called to public duty, not seek it, an 18th c concept dated by his time. Unlike his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he was not called to serve as an ambassador, although he was his father’s private secretary in London.
Instead, he wrote. He wrote an eight-volume history of Jeffersonian America, he wrote political commentary, he wrote travel pieces and about architecture and medieval history.
John Adams and John Quincy Adams were men of their time, men of action, called upon to serve their country. Henry was an observer and an outsider, out of sync, never at home.
John Adams was against slavery and John Quincy Adams fought Congress over the ban to discuss abolition. His father Charles Francis was involved with the anti-slavery Whig party. Henry was uninterested and unengaged with the problems of African Americans.
As capitalism and business men rose to power, Anti-Semitism became mainstream, and Henry was not immune. He despaired to see that the big money of the ‘northern plutocracy” was the rising power in Washington. He railed against corruption and the patronage system, and despaired that too many ‘good men’ avoided politics as a dirty business. He railed against the rise of the Boston Irish.
He married a cerebral woman overly attached to her father, a woman liked by few. After her early death, Adams built her a enigmatic memorial, the details of which he left up to the famed sculpture Saint-Gaudens while he went on a world tour while claiming he died to the world with her.
The arc of Adam’s life crossed a part of American history and politics I was not well versed on, and I found this aspect of the biography to be very interesting. The problems we see today in American politics have deep roots.
Some trivia tidbits from Adams life:
Henry James wrote in a letter to Edith Wharton that Adams read Jane Austen’s Persuasion aloud in the evenings.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Thornton Hancock was inspired by Adams; he had met him when a boy.
Adams studied under geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard, saying his class was “the only teaching that appealed to [my] imagination.”
Adams wrote two novels, including Democracy about Gilded Age Washington DC politics; Teddy Roosevelt found it “essentially mean and base.”
Adams fell in love with an unhappily married, beautiful and intelligent socialite who counted on his friendship but rejected him as a lover. She did not find him physically attractive.
I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.