Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams ... An autobiographical meditation on the costs of modernity, providing along the way a richly allusive slice of American history and life as viewed by the great-grandson of our second president. It is occasionally annoying and self-indulgent, but well worth the aggravation. --Wilfred M. McClay, What to Give a 'First Things' Reader, First Things, December 2008

Writers on the Left dismiss Adams as a white male elitist of the Brahmin starch collar class, and they can hardly acknowledge that the American historian who died 90 years ago had sharper insights about power than do today's Marxists and poststructuralists. Scholars on the Right may find Adams too alienated from the timeless truths that they feel America needs in our culture of relativism. --John Patrick Diggins, The Education of Henry Adams, Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2008, review of The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Version, by Henry Adams, edited by Edward Chalfant and Conrad Edick Wright, History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), by Henry Adams, edited by Earl N. Harbert, and History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison (1809-1817), by Henry Adams, edited by Earl N. Harbert

Pessimism and nostalgia at the bright dawn of the twentieth century must have seemed bizarre to contemporaries.
--The Intercollegiate Review, on The Education of Henry Adams