In the Library
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams, 1907
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 37
- Length
- Length 176k words
£1.99
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A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
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About the book
A man born into the most distinguished political family in America concludes at seventy that none of the education he received prepared him for the century being born around him. Henry Adams, great-grandson of one president and grandson of another, printed this autobiography privately in 1907 and withheld it from the public until after his death. He writes of himself in the third person, tracing the boy in Quincy, the diplomat in wartime London, the historian among the dynamos at the Paris Exposition. The structure pivots on the Virgin and the Dynamo, the medieval force that built Chartres and the modern force he could not name. Education, the book insists, is the failure of every generation to teach the next how to live in the world it has made.