The Education of Henry Adams

About this book

Henry Adams, great-grandson of one American president and grandson of another, tells his own life in the third person, as the story of an education that, he insists, never prepared him for the world he had to live in. He describes his Boston childhood, Harvard, his years in London as secretary to his father, the American minister, during the Civil War, his life as a historian and journalist in Washington, and his visit to the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he stood before the great electric dynamos and felt the force of a new age, which he compared to the power of the Virgin in the Middle Ages.

Context and significance

Adams (1838–1918) printed the book privately for friends in 1907; it was published only after his death, in 1918, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. Its ironic, searching voice has made it one of the most admired American autobiographies. This is the edition of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Compare The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

About the author