Henry Brooke Adams

Henry Brooks Adams was the American historian and writer who, as grandson and great-grandson of presidents, watched American democracy from the closest possible vantage point and found it increasingly baffling. Born in Boston in 1838, he worked as a journalist, taught medieval history at Harvard, and wrote the nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. But his masterpiece is The Education of Henry Adams, published privately in 1907 and posthumously to the public in 1918, in which he uses his own life to measure the gap between the ideals of the eighteenth century and the chaotic energies of the twentieth. A teacher affects eternity, he wrote; he can never tell where his influence stops. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. He died the previous year, still uncertain whether the universe had any meaning at all.