The Education of Henry Adams Summary | Chapterly
The Education of Henry Adams: A Complete Summary "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Overview The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed in 1907, published posthumously in 1918) is one of the strangest and most brilliant autobiographies in the English language. Written in the third person about himself, it is the story of a man who felt perpetually unprepared for the world he inhabited -- a man whose eighteenth-century education left him helpless before the accelerating forces of modernity. Henry Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln's minister to England. He was born into the most distinguished family in American history and given every advantage his era could provide. And yet the entire thrust of the Education is that none of it was adequate. His classical training, his diplomatic experience, his historical scholarship -- none of these equipped him to understand the world that the nineteenth century was becoming. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for autobiography in 1919 and has consistently been ranked among the greatest American nonfiction works. It is not an easy read -- Adams's irony is...