The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams writes his own life in the third person and uses it to ask what an education is worth when the world it prepared a man for keeps disappearing. The publisher presents him as a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, and as constantly focused on the American experiment. The book recounts his own education and the country's from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, taking in the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the rise of the United States as a world power. Adams treats America as both a success and a failure, and the publisher argues that this contradiction was the very impetus that compelled him to write. Running through the account is a deep scepticism about the power of human beings to control the direction of history, caught in the line quoted on the listing, that every generalisation settled forty years earlier has been abandoned. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing the future, the book expresses what Henry James called the complex fate of being an American. It was an immediate bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.

Written from the catalogue listing at Blackwell's reproducing the Oxford World's Classics publisher's synopsis.

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