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The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
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About The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life
Product Description A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A revelatory biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals of his era, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation. Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted powerful figures, including Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Presenting intimate and insightful details of a fascinating and unusual American life and a new window on nineteenth century US history, The Last American Aristocrat shows us a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before. Amazon.com Review It’s not being glib to suggest that, during his time, Henry Adams was a candidate for most interesting man in the world. Born into one of America’s most famous and successful families, he set out to understand, experience, and describe the era when his country was transitioning from a colonial outpost to a modern nation. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review Review “Marvelous…provides a compelling account of America’s transformation in the space of one man’s lifetime, from a Republic where the Adams name meant everything, to an industrialized behemoth that had left him behind.” —The New York Times Book Review “Thoroughly researched and gracefully written…[Henry Adams] was more comfortable on the sidelines than he ever would have been in the arena. And, as Mr. Brown reveals, Adams was a brilliant observer.” —The Wall Street Journal “I vicariously enjoyed the varied life of Henry Adams, America's greatest memoirist.” —Ed Glaeser, The Wall Street Journal's “Books of the Year” “[Brown’s] excellent biography of this flawed but fascinating thinker, descended from two U.S. presidents, illuminates an extraordinary life and the period of great change it spanned.” — The Christian Science Monitor, Best Books of November “The fully fleshed-out Adams that emerges in these pages is irascible, self-contradictory, and always fascinating. Readers will be thrilled by this standout portrait of the man and his era.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A fresh, top-notch biography . . . A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Brown, who expertly places Adams in the context of his time, shows how Adams shaped his distinctively detached and ironic point of view. He tracks Adams’ developing conviction that industrial modernism would cause the decay of western civilization and deconstructs Adams’ nineteenth-century attitudes.” — Booklist “What a wonderful book! With graceful but
