The twenty most turbulent years of his life (and, from the perspective of the reader of a sentimental novel, the most engaging story to tell) are conspicuous in their absence, since they occur right in the middle of the narrative. The Education is an autobiography of a unique type. They constitute one of the greatest philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature. Taken together with his other books, Adams in this spiritual, monumental volume attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature to attempt to understand the place of the individual in society. He published Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, his masterwork in this dazzling effort, in 1904. Functioning in the worlds of both practical men and affairs as a journalist and an assistant to his father, an American diplomat in Washington and London, and of ideas as a prolific writer, as the editor of the prestigious North American Review, and as a professor of medieval, European, and American history at Harvard, Adams of the few men of his era attempted to understand art, thought and culture as one complex force field of interacting energies. This oldest and most distinguished family in Boston produced John Adams and John Qunicy Adams, two American presidents, and thus gave Henry the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Noted American historian Henry Brooks Adams wrote his nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-1891) and also a famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918). Provenance: Charles Franklin Thwing, 1853-1937, American clergyman and educator (bookplate and ownership inscription).Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Custom chemise and quarter morocco slipcase. Original blue cloth, leather spine label (stain to front cover, extremities rubbed, front hinge cracked). BAL 32 Narratives of Personal Experience 2 ("certainly one of the great American biographies"). In 1919 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Modern Library named it as the best non-fiction book published in English since 1900. The text of Education was not made commercially available until 1918, following the author's death, when it was published by Houghton Mifflin. Charles Thwing's copy, with Adams's note to him laid down on the front endpaper: "Take your old book! It’s a rotten one anyway.” Adams would accept an honorary doctor of laws degree from Thwing, who was President of Western Reserve University and also a former student of Adams’s. Washington: Privately printed, 1907.įirst edition, one of only 40 copies printed.
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