Description
Book SynopsisThis selection, the first based on the authoritative six-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.
Trade ReviewErnest Samuels has performed a valuable service in making Adams’s letters accessible for the first time to a large audience. For these letters are compelling and important… The proximity and sensitivity to power that gave many of Adams’s letters lasting interest and credibility also set a more personally interested agenda for his correspondence. * The Nation *
A superbly edited one-volume collection containing much of Adams’s most significant and illustrative correspondence. * Choice *
Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love’ …Besides enriching the stock of informal American literature—for embedded in them are novelistic episodes and passages of power and beauty—the letters constitute a kind of epistolary autobiography that complements Adams’s more reticent memoir. -- Daniel Aaron
Table of ContentsAbbreviations APPRENTICE YEARS 1858-1868 THE CONQUEST OF A REPUTATION 1868-1885 IN SEARCH OF NIRVANA 1886-1892 A FAUSTIAN TRAVELER 1891-1899 CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN ANARCHIST 1899-1905 THE BENEVOLENT SAGE 1906-1918 Genealogy of the Adams Family Chronology Acknowledgments Index
