This autobiography was immediately hailed as a masterpiece upon publication and has even been called the greatest nonfiction book ever written. Henry Adams, whose great-grandfather and grandfather were both U.S. presidents, fills his story with one unforgettably brilliant observation after another. Filled with uncommon wisdom, this book also serves as a thoughtful history of 19th-century America.

Few works have so firmly established their position in American literature as The Education of Henry Adams. As a man of extraordinary gifts and learning and a member of one of the greatest American families, Henry Adams wrote an insightful exploration of himself and the tumultuous age in which he lived. In the words of Van Wyck Brooks, he “revealed a phase of American history with unparalleled boldness and truth.”

In spite of his illustrious background and Harvard schooling, Henry Adams asserts that his conventional education was defective because it did not prepare him to live in a world transformed by the new science and the new technology. His intention was to write a kind of handbook to prepare “young men, in universities and elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency.” The result is what many consider to be one of the finest autobiographies ever written.

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As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, The Education of Henry Adams recounts his own and the country’s education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the growth of the United States as a world power. Exploring America as both a success and a failure, contradiction was the very impetus that compelled Adams to write Education, in which he was also able to voice his deep skepticism about mankind’s power to control the direction of history. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing the future, Adams’ vision expresses what Henry James declared the “complex fate” to be an American, and remains one of the most compelling works of American autobiography today.