The Education of Henry Adams

The pleasure of reading the Education," wrote Alfred Kazin, "is the pleasure of reading a work of literature made up, literally, from historical facts . . . It is the pleasure of seeing history come alive, of seeing it move, of seeing behind history to the actions and actors. It is the pleasure of seeing revealed the humanity so often concealed in history.
His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors--great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams--Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War. Privately printed in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author's death in 1918, Adams's Education is less a memoir and more a work of brilliant history which charts the great transformation in nineteenth-century American intellectual life. A work of profound lyricism, enormous humanity, and remarkable prescience, The Education of Henry Adams presents a world poised between the certainties of the past and the uncertain possibilities of the future.
Its whimsical humor, its detached way of presenting its subject of the history--who is always referred to in the third person in this autobiography--its charming, tender, vivid portraits--all these are irresistible as matters of readability and as features of the author's literary style," proclaimed the New York Times Book Review in 1918.