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Adams, Henry (Brooks) 1:73 (b. Feb. 16, 1838, Boston—d. March 27, 1918, Washington, D.C.), historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams.
Abstract of text biography. Born in New England and educated there as well as in Europe, Adams served as a private secretary (1861—68) to his father, Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. diplomatic representative in London. Upon his return to the U.S., Henry Adams became a political journalist, and in 1870, while also teaching medieval history at Harvard College (1870—77), he assumed the post of editor of the North American Review, in which he supported political reform activities. But after participating in the unsuccessful Liberal Republican movement (1872), hebecame disillusioned with politics and American society and began to write fiction to express his loss of faith.
About that time he also wrote biographies of U.S. historical figures and in 1889-91 produced an extensive scholarly work on the early development of American democracy. Although shocked by his wife’s suicide in 1885, he continued his literary activities and wrote his finest works, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed 1904, published 1913) and his autobiography (privately printed 1906, published 1918), in which he contrasted and explored the ideological unity of the Middle Ages with what he saw as the anarchic multiplicity of 20th-century technological society.
