The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography

by Henry Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge

Book Overview

Few books have so firmly established their place in American literature as The Education of Henry Adams. When it was first published in 1918, it became an instant bestseller and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. More than eighty years later, in an age of self-reflection and exhaustive memoirs, The Education still stands as perhaps the greatest American autobiography. The son of a diplomat, the grandson and great-grandson of two American presidents,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618056661
• ISBN13: 9780618056668
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A meditation on an era

This books stands apart in autobiographies. Unlike autobiographies written in vanity at the crest of success, this one is written as a melancholic meditation on life, at the crest of what Henry Adams thought was his failure. Adams always refers to himself in third person and in the humorous and abject epithets giving the autobiography the character of a novel or a biography. Henry Adams, was a historian, journalist and political private secretary, with intrests as varied as physics, chemistry, geology, evolution, mathematics, politics, history, and diplomacy. He was the son of a diplomat, Charles Francis Adams. His grand-father was John Quincy Adams the 6th president of USA and great-grand father was John Adams, the 2nd president. Despite being one of the greatest American historians, with a successful career in history, journalism and literature, Adams regarded himself as a failure because he was inconsequential in politics and society as compared to his forefathers and his education based on eighteenth century principles of the founding fathers of USA, imparted through his relatives, peers, school, socity and the Harvard College, was unsuitable to meet the challenges of the world he was to grow into - the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adams believed that the law of acceleration of forces in history lead to a situation where a person trained for a certain level of complexity finds himself at the mercy of forces of a higher complexity as he grows up. This was his theory of history, intimately derived from his experience of life. He felt that all education through parents, school, college, work or life can never in its entirety prepare a person for life, because the society around you changes at an accelerating pace while your education rooted in your parents values and the value of the soceity of your childhood becomes obsolete by the time you need to put it to use. So at each stage of life man always needs to begin his education anew. The merit of this books goes beyond just and insight into education, life or failure. It also illuminates the time from 1838 to 1905. Adams was close to political, literary, artistic and scientific circles in Europe and America and travelled far and wide visiting England, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Egypt, Mexico and Cuba, some of these countries again and again. The books is rich in literary style and historical, literary, scientific, cultural, economic and sociological insights as it analyzes self, peoples, times and cultures.

Development of a conscience

The title of "The Education of Henry Adams" sounds like an autobiography, but the book is really about the development of a man's conscience and theory of human history, using the world events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a backdrop and a laboratory. Henry Adams -- whose great grandfather was John Adams, the second American President, and whose grandfather obviously was John Quincy Adams, the sixth -- is more than just a presidential legacy; he reveals himself to be a great thinker and writer, the brilliance of his "Education" ensuring him a permanent place in the American canon. The book has a few attributes that distinguish it from a typical autobiography. The most noticeable is that Adams writes in the third, not first, person. He repeats the word "education" like a mantra throughout the book, referring to it in its literal, not formal, sense: the "bringing up", or development, of a person's mind, manner, and outlook. The narrative is very personal and is not, as some may expect, a rigid historical perspective, although it does offer plenty of commentary on contemporary historical and political events, from the Civil War to two presidential assassinations (Lincoln's and McKinley's, but not Garfield's) to the Industrial Revolution's impact on the American commercial landscape. Adams writes like a novelist, and this book reads like a novel. His lyrical prose is all the more amazing because it seems like a product of the very education he finds so evasive. Growing up in Quincy, Massachussetts, he hated school; he even confesses that he got little to nothing out of his years at Harvard. Always hopeful to be educated by new experiences, he serves as a secretary to his father, an ambassador, in London during the American Civil War, where he learns about diplomacy from high-ranking British politicians. He proceeds to dabble in various arts and sciences, start a career in journalism, and become an instructor at Harvard, noting the irony of teaching while still searching for his own education.Throughout the book we get a very vivid picture of Adams as an idiosyncratic mixture of humanism, modesty, shyness, erudition, and a polite sort of cynicism. He has a rather socratic tendency to dismiss all the previous knowledge he has collected as worthless for his continuing education, resolving to start from scratch with a new source. A curious omission in the book is the twenty-year period in which his marriage ends with his wife's suicide; perhaps this event was just too painful to write about, because it's difficult to believe that this experience could not have influenced the pursuit of his education. If Adams's education can be said to have a culmination, it is in his development of a "dynamic theory of history," in which he compares physical forces (gravity, magnetism) acting on a body to historical forces, produced by the conflict of the sciences ("The Dynamo") against the arts ("The Virgin"), acting on man. With this

Stupid Teachers.....show some respect to Mr. Adams

I can only laugh, to hear the reports of students being required to read Adams. If there is one thing I am certain, it is that Adams would not appreciate being assigned. "The Education" is intended for those real students whose *desire* is learning. I put special emphasis on *desire*, not for the sake of being pompous, but to distinguish this type of desire as being self-motivated. Adams "Education" is a tremendous rebuttal to the ordinary, institutionalized education. There is little doubt as to the socio-economic benefits and sensibilities of formal education, but one should also recognize its inherent limitations. People seldom enjoy what they are forced to do! Adams' "Education" is not to be read as a classic, or because well-read people discuss it over coffee...rather, read it because you're curious. If you've forgotten that school and education are distinct, let Mr. Adams show you the difference. And well meaning teachers of the world.....Phuhleease, don't require Mr. Adams, as you will ruin the experience. --One last note; I think the other reviewers miss the boat when they call Adams cynical and depressing. This is not cynicism, but wit-big difference. For cynicism see Sinclair Lewis' Babbit(which you shouldnt assign either I might add). As far as depressing, I just don't get that at all. It was patently obvious to this reader that Mr. Adams' high-mindedness and detachment were toungue and cheek. In writing his "Education" Mr. Adams, no doubt, enjoyed himself...and while reading it, so will you.

An uneven but rich take on a world in transition

Its funny how some reading experiences emcompass more than just the book itself. In the case of Henry Adams autobiographical essay collection, The Education of Henry Adams, I always think of a sunny day in the park. The first time I read the book I was still in High School and believed that I had an obligation to read all those books that had been identified as "classics". This was one. I read most of it one afternoon while sitting under a large oak tree in Shelby Park in Nashville, TN. I remember contrasting the gloom and pessimism of Adams thought with the sunny day and the optimistic prospects I believed the future held for me. I argued with him as I read. I thought his reaction to Darwin, for example, was misplaced and in bad faith. I thoroughly disagreed with his argument in the chapter "The Virgin and the Dynamo"; I felt I knew enough about the Middle Ages to prefer living in a time of electric lights, running water, medical science and imperfect democracy than in a hovel in some Medieval village dominated by King and the Roman Catholic Church. I dismissed Henry Adams as a whiner and an educated misfit who had nothing to say to me.Its also funny how the passage of time changes one's perceptions. Rereading the book a couple of decades later I was surprised to find how much Adams and I had in common. I still didn't agree with his particular nostalgia for a time he had never experienced except in his imagination, but his sense of loss, of powerlessness, of the world slipping into some dangerous entropic state, all rang true to me. I also had read enough history of the 19th Century to appreciate more his many insightful anecdotes of the period. The subtlety of his humor and the richness of his writing style I also found appealing. I found this reading to be a much more rewarding experience - and I can't tell you a thing about where I was at the time, except deeply into the book.

Adam's cynical view of U.S. history is amusing and brilliant

Dear Stefi, Now that there is a slight lull in the happy Chestertown merry-go-round, I want to write a paragraph or two explaining why is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. This is why it is so interesting: It was written about 1906 and covers U.S. intellectual and political history from about 1860 to 1906. What is clever about it is the cynical, humorous sophistication (very unAmerican) with which he, an insider, regards all of these events. The book, like Montaigne or Rousseau's is an autobiography and, like Montaigne, Adams is of the view that life should above all be amusing, so that any great enterprise should be undertaken only if it is indeed amusing. The driving idea of the book, however, is where to find the truth (you guessed it--he is still searching on the last page). The places where he searches are very intriguing. He begins at Harvard, where, says he, he learned nothing from books and only one thing from the classes: how to get up and talk in front of large crowds of people about nothing. He was required to do this routinely, and his speeches were, like everyone else's, greeted with hissing and criticisms, so he learned not to expect approbation from an audience. Adams got heavily into the debate about evolution (Darwin being the hot topic at the end of the nineteenth century), because he thought it was the main amusement of his era. His position on evolution is "reversion" rather than progress. One of his proofs is a comparison of George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. He admired Washington (a great general who became a great president); he voted for Grant (a great general). He knew personally the members of Grant's cabinet, thieves or incompetents at best. QED: things are getting worse not better. In his old age (sixty), after many other amusements of a busy lifetime, he decided to do what I did at the age of twenty-two: to visit all the important medieval French cathedrals. (In 1958, I bought a car in Saarbrucken--VW bug--and drove to seventeen of the greatest cathedrals, Guide Michelin in hand, staying at the youth hostels.) His book is peppered with well-digested quotations from French literature; he apparently knew it from top to bottom. His goal was to understand the Middle Ages (unity in the Virgin) and to write two books, one about the unity of the Middle Ages (title: ) and another about the diversity of the twentieth century, . Adam's book has a number of difficult spots (confusing original philosophy and historical references that mean something only to the well-informed historian), but the good parts are worth going on to find. I hope this vignette will persuade you to get through the boring chapters at the beginning of the book on his childhood in Quincy. The narrative becomes interesting only with his stories about the Court of Saint James where he spent his early twenties as a diplomat during the U.S. Civil War. F