Portrait of a Failure

Daniel Aaron

  • Henry Adams by Ernest Samuels
    Harvard, 504 pp, £19.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 674 38735 X
  • The Letters of Henry Adams: Vols I-VI edited by J.C Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins-Winner
    Harvard, 2016 pp, £100.75, July 1990, ISBN 0 674 52685 6

Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love’. For many intellectuals, The Education of Henry Adams defined their predicament. They relished its irony, learning and worldly tone, and saw in Adams’s gloomy appraisal of his age and its prospects a corroboration of their discontents. Today his catastrophic imagination is tuned to current fears, and he continues to draw strong responses from both admirers and detractors.

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