Due to his birth rank, the family had lower expectations for Adams, although he saw his role as private secretary to his father, during service as America's minister to Britain from 1861 to 1868, as a stepping stone to a career in politics. Due to the influence of his tutor, James Russell Lowell, Adams pursued two years of graduate study at the University of Berlin. Adams grew up believing himself to be a member of the ruling class destined to be involved in politics.Īdams attended Harvard College, receiving a bachelor of arts in 1858.
Along with receiving an education appropriate to his class, Adams absorbed current political ideas from his father and those who visited the house, particularly Charles Sumner. At the age of four, having survived a bout with scarlet fever, Adams joined the rest of the family at their new home on Mount Vernon Street in Quincy, a suburb of Boston. The fourth child of statesman and diplomat Charles Francis and Abigail Brown, Henry Adams was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1838. This edition contained a preface penned by Adams but signed by Henry Cabot Lodge in 1918. The second text was released to the general public after Adams died.
These one hundred copies had a preface authored by Adams. Were not among the first one hundred went to extraordinary lengths to glean any information about the contents. The other deafening silence concerns the absence of the lessons he must have learned from his wife's suicide.Īdams' release of one hundred self-published folios of The Education of Henry Adams to some of the most powerful people on earth-from writers to heads of state-guaranteed interest. However, he says almost nothing on his role as advisor and confidante to John Hay, secretary of state to President William McKinley and President Theodore Roosevelt, while the United States became a world power.
Adams discusses his experience as private secretary to his father, minister to England during the American Civil War. Adams does provide insight into the Adams family, a source of fascination not unlike the Kennedys, but he is curiously silent on two areas of his own life. The import of the text begins with its author, the weight of its influence with its first audience its continued appreciation has as much to do with the first two factors as the fact that it was brilliantly constructed by a man of letters at the height of his powers.ĭescended from one of America's most famous political families, Adams contributed a classic work of American historiography and one of the most famous autobiographies of American literature instead of making a great political contribution to the country. The Education of Henry Adams had been an important and influential text for a decade before Henry Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in autobiography in 1918.
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