Download or read book Henry Adams in Washington written by Ormond Seavey and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A descendent of two U.S. presidents and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Henry Adams enjoyed a very particular place in American life, not least due to his ancestry. Yet despite his prolific writing in the years between 1877 and 1891, when he lived in Washington, D.C., Adams has somehow slipped into the gap between history and literature. In Henry Adams in Washington, Ormond Seavey integrates the diverse aspects of Adams’s writing, arguing for his placement among the major American writers of the nineteenth century. Examining Adams’s nine-volume History, which Seavey argues demands renewed literary attention, as well as his two novels, Democracy and Esther, and his biographies of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph of Roanoke, Seavey shows how Adams reveals his own character and personality in his writings, particularly his fondness for the personal rather than the public sphere. As a historian writing in Washington, D.C., Adams surely encountered the expectation that public life takes precedence over the personal; in the execution of both his historical writing and his novels, however, he dwells instead on the personal costs of public life and the diminishment of public figures who lack a fulfilling personal life. Revealing Adams to be a missing link between the essential American writers in the time of Emerson and the modernist writers of the early twentieth century, Seavey shows his novels to be considerations of contemporary political issues while also recognizing the novelistic dimensions in his history and biographies.
Download or read book The Last American Aristocrat written by David S. Brown and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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).
Download or read book Democracy written by Henry Adams and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Education of Henry Adams written by Henry Adams and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication of the book had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Download or read book The Education of Henry Adams written by Henry Adams and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2022-10-04T17:27:17Z with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Download or read book Henry Adams written by Ernest Samuels and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Adams sought, late in life, to thwart prospective biographers by writing his own biography. Published soon after his death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams was rightly greeted as a masterpiece. Not until thirty years later, with the appearance of the first volume of Ernest Samuelsâe(tm)s biography, did it become apparent how much the story had been colored by Adamsâe(tm)s singular philosophy of history and how great was the disparity between the protagonist of the Education and Adams as he actually was. Upon its completion in 1964, Samuelsâe(tm)s life of Henry Adams was hailed as âeoeone of the great biographical achievements of our timeâe ; its laurels included a Pulitzer Prize.Ernest Samuels has now distilled his ample narrative into a single absorbing volume. We see Adams as a lively undergraduate, in contrast to the jaded young man of the Education; as budding writer, newspaper correspondent, eager participant in political maneuverings in Washington and at the American embassy in London; as teacher at Harvard and editor of the North American Review; settled in Washington, as scholar, biographer, historian, novelist; as insatiable traveler; as friend and adviser to statesmen; as elderly cosmopolite spending half of each year abroad; and always as witty chronicler of the social scene and trenchant commentator on the events of his time. We are drawn into the personal drama of Adamsâe(tm)s middle years: his married life with Clover; the halcyon period in Washington in the early 1880s, catastrophically terminated by Cloverâe(tm)s depression and suicide; his growing passion for Elizabeth Cameron; and his flight to the South Seas. Throughout the book we follow the genesis and progress of his writings, from his muckracking journalism in President Grantâe(tm)s Washington, through the social and political criticism of his novels, his biographies, and his great History, to the classic Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the daring theories of the Education, and his last essays.Few biographies have so broad a canvasâe"sixty years of American political, social, and intellectual life, from the preâe"Civil War years to the First World War. And few offer so revealing a portrait of a complex human being and an extraordinary career.
Download or read book Henry Adams Selected Letters written by Henry Adams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernest Samuels's Pulitzer Prize-winning, multi-volume work on Henry Adams is now a compact, updated, one-volume biography. Henry Adams has been called an indispensable figure in American thought. Although he famously "took his own life" in the autobiographical Education of Henry Adams, his letters--more intimate and unbuttoned, though hardly unselfconscious--are themselves indispensable for an understanding of the man and his times. This selection, the first based on the authoritative 6-volume Letters, represents every major private and public event in Adams's life from 1858 to 1918 and confirms his reputation as one of the greatest letter writers of his time. Adams knew everyone who was anyone and went almost everywhere, and--true to the Adams family tradition--recorded it all. These letters to an array of correspondents from American presidents to Henry James to 5-year-old honorary nieces reveal Adams's passion for politics and disdain for politicians, his snobbish delight in society and sincere affection for friends, his pose of dilettantism and his serious ambitions as writer and historian, his devastation at his wife's suicide and his acquiescence in the role of Elizabeth Cameron's "tame cat," his wicked humor at others' expense and his own reflexive self-depreciation. This volume allows the reader to experience 19th-century America through the eyes of an observer on whom very little was lost, and to make the acquaintance of one of the more interesting personalities in American letters. As Ernest Samuels says in his introduction, "The letters lift the veil of old-age disenchantment that obscures the Education and exhibit Adams as perhaps the most brilliant letter writer of his time. What most engages one in the long course of his correspondence is the tireless range of his intellectual curiosity, his passionate effort to understand the politics, the science, and the human society of the world as it changed around him... It is as literature of a high order that his letters can finally be read."
Download or read book Henry Adams the Southern Question written by Michael O'Brien and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.” This judgment, rendered in The Education of Henry Adams, may be the most quoted of Adams’s writings on the South. However, it is far from the only one of his beliefs that helped to shape a national outlook on the region from the late antebellum period to the present. Thinking about the South, says Michael O’Brien, was “part of being an Adams.” In this book O’Brien shows how Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. O’Brien explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history. He begins with the young Henry Adams, who served as his father’s secretary in the House of Representatives during the secession crises of 1860-1861 and in the American embassy in London during and after the Civil War, until 1868. O’Brien then covers a number of topics relevant to Adams’s outlook on the South, including his residency in that deceptively “southern” city, Washington, D.C.; his journalism on the Reconstruction-era South; his biographical or historical works on the Virginians John Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; and his two novels, especially Democracy. Finally, O’Brien ponders the vein of southern self-criticism--exemplified by Wilbur J. Cash’s Mind of the South--that embraces the notorious slur so often quoted from The Education of Henry Adams.
Download or read book Henry Adams and the Making of America written by Garry Wills and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007-08 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Wills showcases Henry Adams little-known but seminal studyof the early United States, and draws from it fresh insights on the paradoxesthat roil America to this day.
Download or read book Henry Adams in the Secession Crisis written by Henry Adams and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Secession Winter session of Congress, twenty-two-year-old Henry Adams worked as private secretary to his father, Representative Charles Francis Adams. Henry wrote four accounts of these crucial months in Washington -- an essay, letters to his brother, a segment in his famous autobiography, and twenty-one unsigned letters that Adams composed as a novice correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser. Henry Adams in the Secession Crisis presents the Advertiser letters for the first time since their original publication between 1860 and 1861. During the months prior to the Civil War, Adams provided unusual insights into the development of the secession crisis and the attempts of Congress to resolve it peacefully. Since his father and Senator William H. Seward of New York led the efforts of more moderate Republicans to reach a compromise that would at least hold the border slave states in the Union, Adams's letters emphasize and illuminate their efforts and those of their Unionist allies in the upper South. While praising their endeavors -- and particularly the statesmanship of Seward -- Adams attacked southern secessionists and, in several letters, critically analyzed and condemned the famous Crittenden Compromise as a measure impossible for any Republican to support. Fully annotated by historian Mark J. Stegmaier, the Advertiser letters illuminate the politics of the secession crisis while showcasing the youthful work of a man who would become one of the most famous American writers of the late nineteenth century.
Download or read book Henry Adams and His Friends written by Henry Adams and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 936 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS written by Henry Adams and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2023-12-24 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eBook edition of "THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Henry Adams (1838-1918) was a member of the political family founded by John Adams during the American Revolution. While his ambitions were literary and historical (his major work is a massive history of the United States in the age of Jefferson), he was not completely immune from the political life. The Education of Henry Adams is the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography of Henry Adams. He recounts the education he received, lamenting that formal schooling failed to prepare him for a century of technological and philosophical change. This book is an excellent way to learn about 19th century America, interestingly he chose the third person to tell his own story The Education is much more a record of Adams's introspection than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education at Harvard failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes he saw in his lifetime; hence his need for self-education. Many consider this the best autobiography ever written.
Download or read book Henry Adams written by Elizabeth Stevenson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His great grandfather and his grandfather had been presidents of the United States, and to a small boy this seemed a matter of course in his family. But Henry Adams, belonging to a later generation, coming to maturity at the time of the Civil War, found himself in an age uncongenial to the leadership of such men as his ancestors. In the changing world of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Adams found his rightful place as an observer and critic rather than a participant in public life. But no time and no country ever had a keener mind to take note of the comic and tragic qualities embedded in the political, economic, and human drama upon which he gazed. And his writings appeal timelessly in their incisive wit, their warm charm, and in the way they speak to us of a very individual personality. When Stevenson's book first appeared, the New York Times called it 'One of the noteable biographies of recent years,' and it won the Bancroft Prize that year. It remains an engrossing portrait of a remarkable man.It is good to take note of the sage he became in his late, great books: Mont-St. Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. This biography explains how Henry Adams became the man both admired and feared in his later years. He was first a bright, unformed young man who was a diplomatic assistant to his father; then an ambitious journalist, a writer of several 'sensational' newspaper and magazine articles. Next he became a provocative and innovative teacher, and a historian unequalled in his presentation of the Jeffersonian period. Until his wife's tragic death, he was a willing actor on the social scene of his beloved Washington, D.C. Throughout, he remained a friend and instigator of the careers of friends in artistic and scientific fields. His writings speak to us still and seem contemporary in their tone as well as their view of cycles of culture and their warnings of decline and achievement.
Download or read book The Five of Hearts written by Patricia O'Toole and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Five of Hearts, who first gathered in Washington in the Gilded Age, included Henry Adams, historian and scion of America's first political dynasty; his wife, Clover, gifted photographer and tragic victim of depression; John Hay, ambassador and secretary of state; his wife, Clara, a Midwestern heiress; and Clarence King, pioneering geologist, entrepreneur, and man of mystery. They knew every president from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and befriended Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and a host of other illustrious figures on both sides of the Atlantic.
Download or read book The Letters of Henry Adams written by Henry Adams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 910 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Life of Albert Gallatin written by Henry Adams and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of the United States of America written by Henry Adams and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
