Ernest Samuels

Henry Adams

Traces the life of the American historian, novelist, and journalist, and discusses his approach to history

Jayne Samuels

Both as a biography and as a chapter of social and cultural history, this book portrays the life of the connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting

Bernard Berenson, the Making of a Legend

"Education had ended in 1871, life was complete in 1890." With this paradoxical statement, Adams apparently dismissed from the record twenty of the most interesting and active years of his career. Opening on the highest note of expectation and closing with his desperate flight to the South Seas in 1890, a divided and lonely figure, that season of fulfillment and inner growth is the subject of this book. Through detailed analyses of Adams' writings, Samuels shows how this drama eventually became transformed into works of literary art.

The Middle Years

Jacob C. Levenson

Henry Adams' letters are among the best in the language. They are, in Alfred Kazin's words, "magnificent, his most spontaneous arid freest literary works." With the completion of this edition, they may well be judged his most significant achievement. "The letters are not a gloss on a life's work; in a real sense they are his life's work' the reviewer for American Literature stated. We encounter Adams in 1892 at a turning point in his career, at the beginning of the period in which his leading ideas would he crystallized and his major literary works take shape. He had survived the shock of his wife's suicide and had completed his great History of the Jefferson era, and after his long journey in the South Seas his frustrated passion for Elizabeth Cameron had begun to calm. His wanderlust now took him to the Carolinas and the Rockies, to Mexico, Cuba, Egypt, the Near East, Greece, Italy, central Europe, Russia, and the North Cape. His interest came increasingly to center on the geopolitical present and the medieval past. Prompted by the Panic of 1893, he began an intensive study of the new finance capitalism and the imperial power it created; by the end of the decade he was beginning to foresee the shift of global dominance from Britain to the United States and Russia. Meanwhile a tour of the churches and abbeys of Normandy fired his imagination and led to the absorption in the art and culture 0f medieval France that would bear fruit in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres At his home on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, he became an informal adviser to statesmen, John Hay and Theodore Roosevelt among them. Out of his friendly association with scientists arid his own study of science came his conviction that the dynamo and radium were bringing a revolution in physics. His germinating ideas about science, technology, and economic power were conveyed in his letters over many years before they were formulated in The Education of Henry Adams, his "Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." The Adams who emerges from the letters is far more complex, contradictory, and human than the protagonist of the Education. He writes to women, Mrs. Cameron above all, about politics, economics, and science as well as social news and palace gossip, just as he writes to men about art as well as power. The multiplicity of his interests, his sharp perceptions, eye for telling detail, and passion for generalization, together with his irony and wit, make his letters the engrossing record of an extraordinary life-in-progress and an incomparable commentary upon his age.

The Letters of Henry Adams

Recounts Berenson's development into the most famous critic and arbiter of taste in the Anglo-American art world and illuminates his relationships with many of the great philosophers, writers, and art patrons of his time

Ernest Samuels

About

Books

Join the club