The Education of Henry Adams; An Autobiography

New York: Modern Library, 1999. Third edition. Paperback. as New. 517pp Octavo. Copper colored spine and illustrated front cover. "The pleasure of reading the Education," wrote Alfred Kazin, "is the pleasure of reading a work of literature made up, literally, from historical facts." His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors- great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams- Henry Adams was one of the most original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War. Privately printed in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author's death in 1918, Adam's Education is less a memoir than a work of brilliant history that charts the great transformation in nineteenth-century American intellectual life. A work of enormous humanity and remarkable prescience, The Education of Henry Adams presents a world poised between the certainties of the past and the uncertain possibilities of the future.