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The Education of Henry Adams is the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography of Henry Adams. The Education is much more a record of Adams's introspection than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education at Harvard failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes he saw in his lifetime; hence his need for self-education.

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The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication of the book had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.

The Education of Henry Adams is listed as the number one non-fiction book in the English language by The Modern Library. Henry Brooks Adams, a Harvard professor of History and a scion of the Adams political dynasty, was raised a proper Bostonian and educated in the classics, as was the tradition. He came of age at the start of the Civil War and served in government and academia during a long career that spanned a half century of astonishing growth and change in the United States, a period sometimes described as the Second Industrial Revolution and which he terms a “dynamo”. His chronicle is a unique blend of autobiography, memoir, and meditation that dwells on the social, political, intellectual, and technological changes that occurred during his lifetime. It is unusual in its third person narration and is frequently sarcastic and humorously self-deprecating. Adams makes it clear that his formal preparation was thoroughly inadequate to comprehend the emerging world, especially in the areas of science and mathematics, and argues strongly for the value of experience and self-education. The book began as a private limited edition for friends in 1907. It was not intended for publication, which may explain why he largely ignores family life, focusing his introspection on areas likely to be of professional interest to his colleagues. It was published in 1918 after his death at the urging of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. Readers ever since have been transported by his canny ability to make dusty historical events and social trends come alive through his personal relationships and experiences. As such, The Education of Henry Adams is an indispensable document to understanding a vital period in American history and culture. 17 hours 32 minutes

The Education of Henry Adams has long been for me one of the great chronicles of society in our literature. In a book which is devoted to society in the imagination of some key American writers between the end of the Civil War and the end of the century, and which will therefore deal largely with social novels, I can begin with the autobiography of an historian because this remarkable but singular book illustrates the dilemma in this period of a literary artist who was not a novelist. Adams was an unusually subtle writer; among the American historians who still regarded themselves as writers, history as a branch of literature, he stands out as the last and the best. Although he was to offer himself as the prophet of a “scientific” approach to history, it will be seen that he wrote “science,” as he had always written history, from a confident and even arrogant literary instinct. He was an extraordinarily accomplished writer, but by the time he came to write Mont-Saint-Michel at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Education of Henry Adams in 1905, he was to show himself to the friends for whom he privately printed these books, as he had already shown himself in his letters, to be an original one. Both his much-vaunted science of history and his sense of historical truth were to become casualties of his literary virtuosity.Still, of all the interesting American historians, Adams had the largest intellectual ambition and the surest literary gift. So it is natural to think of him as a great historian — and not merely because we recognize him as an artist. What we mean by a “great historian” is not the most immediately influential writer of history, not the most painstaking specialist in history, but the writer who, within the discipline of scholarship, has more than any other created our image of history, who in fact shapes our idea of history.1 The great historians and their books are closest to what “history” means to us. Since “history,” as an intellectual order in the mind, is essentially the creation of the historian, it follows that it is the great historians who have made “history.”Adams has more than any other American historian made us see the transition to the modern age in his terms. Yet not many Americans have read. Adams's most important professional effort in history, his nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-1891) 2, or such historical specialties as his Chapters of Erie (1871), Essays in Anglo- Saxon Law (1876), Documents Relating to New England Federalism (1878), The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), or John Randolph…

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU began his famous Confessions by a vehement appeal to the Deity: “I have shown myself as I was; contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Father! Collect about me the innumerable swarm of my fellows; let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my unworthiness; let them blush at my meannesses! Let each of them discover his heart in his turn at the foot of thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let any one of them tell thee if he dares: ‘I was a better man!’”Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the eighteenth century, and has been commonly thought to have had more influence than any other teacher of his time; but his peculiar method of improving human nature has not been universally admired. Most educators of the nineteenth century have declined to show themselves before their scholars as objects more vile or contemptible than necessary, and even the humblest teacher hides, if possible, the faults with which nature has generously embellished us all, as it did Jean Jacques, thinking, as most religious minds are apt to do, that the Eternal Father himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature offers scarcely one working model for high education. The student must go back, beyond Jean Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron’s wants. The tailor’s object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers.At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the air of reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it had life. Who knows? Possibly it had!February 16, 1907

The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication of the book had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.

The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century. Mentioning at the time, recent, discoveries of X-rays and radioactivity, the book focuses on the Adams' bewilderment and concern at the rapid advance in science and technology over the course of his lifetime.