Henry Adams
by Ernest Samuels
Summary
Ernest Samuels's three volume biography follows Henry Adams from his 1838 birth in Boston, into a family that had already produced two presidents, his grandfather John Quincy Adams and great grandfather John Adams, and a father, Charles Francis Adams, who served as the United States minister to Britain during the Civil War while young Henry worked as his private secretary in London. The biography's second volume, The Middle Years, follows him through the years after 1877, when he left a professorship in medieval history at Harvard, where he had pioneered the American seminar method of teaching, to devote himself to writing, producing a nine volume history of the United States under Jefferson and Madison that historians still cite for its documentary command.
That volume's central event is the December 1885 death of Adams's wife, Marian Hooper Adams, known as Clover, who took her own life with the potassium cyanide she used in her photography work, a loss Samuels shows Adams never fully recovering from; Adams commissioned the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens to design the haunting, unnamed memorial that still marks her grave in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery. The third and final volume, The Major Phase, completed in 1964, follows Adams afterward into decades of restless travel between Paris and Washington, and into the writing of his two most enduring books, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, a study of medieval unity, and The Education of Henry Adams, a memoir written in the third person that treated Adams's own life as a case study in a modern education's failure to prepare a man for the century he actually had to live in. It closes with the stroke Adams suffered in 1912, reportedly triggered by news of the Titanic's sinking, and his death in March 1918 at eighty, months short of seeing The Education, until then privately printed only for friends, published for the general public and, the following year, awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in its own right.
Historical Context & Significance
Harvard University Press published the three volumes of Samuels's Henry Adams across sixteen years, The Young Henry Adams in 1948, Henry Adams: The Middle Years in 1958, and Henry Adams: The Major Phase in 1964, and the completed trilogy won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography as well as the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize, an unusual sweep of the major American history and biography awards for a single project.
Samuels had begun the research in a doctoral dissertation on Adams's early career, completed at the University of Chicago in 1942, more than two decades before the third volume appeared, and he later drew on the same research to edit a six volume edition of Adams's letters. The completed biography remains the fullest documentary account of a man whose own writing, in The Education, had already made an American classic out of the argument that no biography could ever fully capture him.