The Letters of Henry Adams (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Henry Brooks Adams
- Type of Work: Letters
- Time of Work: Volume IV: 1892-1899, Volume V: 1899-1905, and Volume VI: 1906-1918
- Setting: Washington, D.C., and Paris, France
- Genres: Nonfiction, Letters
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Politics, Racism, Authors or writers, Historians, Anti-Semitism, Death or dying, Politicians, Letters, Democracy, Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint
- Locales: Paris, France, Washington, D.C.
Henry Adams of Massachusetts, the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of another, “born,” as he claims in the famous opening sentences of his autobiography, “in the shadow of the Boston statehouse,” was doomed by temperament, chance, and history to spend his life as an observer of power. A disappointed romantic, Adams created from his own limitations and deficiencies a role that could mask his impotence without deflating his self-esteem. As a professional pessimist, an ironic commentator on the political foibles of his contemporaries, he brought to those who cared...
[The entire page is 2237 words long]
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