The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

by David S. Brown

Overview

A “marvelous...compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation.

Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist.

Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these powerful men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era.

“Thoroughly researched and gracefully written” (The Wall Street Journal), The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence.

Offering a fresh window on nineteenth century US history, as well as a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before, The Last American Aristocrat is a “standout portrait of the man and his era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982128241
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	11/09/2021
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	491,678
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

David S. Brown teaches history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of seven books, among them four biographies: The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Prelude: Back to Beverly 9

Part I Becoming Henry Adams

Inheritance

1 Quincy 15

2 Party of One 21

3 The Madam 25

4 Heroes 31

5 Harvard 37

Education

6 Germany 47

7 Italy 55

8 Washington 63

9 London 71

10 The Correspondent 79

Illusions

11 Going South, Coming Home 89

12 The Race Question 95

13 Waiting on Another Washington 101

14 The High Road to Reform 109

15 Following the Money 113

Boston

16 The Professor 125

17 The Insurgent 133

18 Clover 139

19 Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law 147

20 Political Adieu 153

21 Filial Piety 161

22 Emancipation 167

Washington

23 Hearts Play 175

24 Gallatin 181

25 Democracy 187

26 Second Heart 195

27 Back to Bizarre 201

28 Between Science and Salvation 207

29 The New House 215

30 Empty Heart 221

Part II Performing Henry Adams

Flight

31 The Posthumous Life 233

32 Japan 237

33 The Historians Tale 245

34 Babes in Paradise 255

35 The First Law of Tame Cats 265

36 What the Sphinx Said 273

Fury

37 Chicago 283

38 The Gold-Bugs 289

39 "My Cuba" 297

40 The Tyranny of Science 303

41 The Felt Experience 309

42 Blame 313

Dynamo

43 The Jingo 327

44 Silent and Infinite Force 333

45 Lamb among Lions 337

46 In the Land of the Czars 343

Resonance

47 None but the Saints 351

48 Stranded 357

49 Bocjk of Illusions 365

50 There Was a Boy 373

51 To Finish the Game 379

52 The Rest in Silence 385

Acknowledgments 393

Notes 395

Index 425

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/14/2020

Historian Brown (Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald) delivers a splendid biography of Harvard professor and memoirist Henry Adams (1838–1918). The direct descendant of two presidents and a diplomat, Adams, who is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, sardonically referred to himself as a “failure.” Yet he managed to emerge from his prominent family’s shadow and make a worthy and memorable life for himself, Brown reveals. He vividly describes Adams’s milieu during a period of sweeping social change in America, detailing his marriage to socialite and photographer Marian “Clover” Hooper, who committed suicide in 1885; his friendships with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Henry Cabot Lodge; and his travels in Cuba, Japan, Russia, and the South Pacific. Brown also tracks how Adams’s views on the Civil War shifted during his tenure as his father’s personal secretary in London, and notes his stances against the spoils system, the gold standard, and imperialism, as well as his ethnic and racial prejudices. The fully fleshed-out Adams that emerges in these pages is irascible, self-contradictory, and always fascinating. Readers will be thrilled by this standout portrait of the man and his era. Agent: Chris Calhoun, Chris Calhoun Agency (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Marvelous...provides a compelling account of America’s transformation in the space of one man’s lifetime, from a Republic where the Adams name meant everything, to an industrialized behemoth that had left him behind.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Thoroughly researched and gracefully written...[Henry Adams] was more comfortable on the sidelines than he ever would have been in the arena. And, as Mr. Brown reveals, Adams was a brilliant observer.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The book proceeds less day by day than idea by idea, theme by theme, and this approach works particularly well.” —Boston Globe

“I vicariously enjoyed the varied life of Henry Adams, America's greatest memoirist.” —Ed Glaeser, The Wall Street Journal's “Books of the Year”

“Well-written and enthralling . . . [Brown] makes the case for Henry as the most interesting of the Adamses.” —Chronicle

“[Brown’s] excellent biography of this flawed but fascinating thinker, descended from two U.S. presidents, illuminates an extraordinary life and the period of great change it spanned.” —The Christian Science Monitor, Best Books of November

“David Brown’s fine [The Last American Aristocrat] is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations.” —Jonathan Parry, London Review of Books

“The fully fleshed-out Adams that emerges in these pages is irascible, self-contradictory, and always fascinating. Readers will be thrilled by this standout portrait of the man and his era.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A fresh, top-notch biography . . . A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Brown, who expertly places Adams in the context of his time, shows how Adams shaped his distinctively detached and ironic point of view. He tracks Adams’ developing conviction that industrial modernism would cause the decay of western civilization and deconstructs Adams’ nineteenth-century attitudes.” —Booklist

“What a wonderful book! With graceful but urgent prose, David Brown holds Adams to account, asking hard questions about his life and work with empathy and deep insight. Here is Henry Adams in the round: a long American life filled with achievement and failure, pleasures and sorrows. This beautifully constructed narrative manages to be both timeless and timely all at once.” —Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life

“For general readers and scholars alike, The Last American Aristocrat will be the defining biography of Henry Adams for many years to come.” —William Merrill Decker, author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams

“The Last American Aristocrat is a merciless, searing—and yet touching and sympathetic—biography of a brilliant man who rarely mustered sympathy for others. Henry Adams was convinced that he was living at the end of the world that produced him, and with finesse and skill David Brown makes him a flawed but revealing subject who resonates with our times. A fascinating book.” —Richard White, professor emeritus of American history, Stanford University, and author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896

“One of the most important critics of industrial capitalism and American modernity gets his due (warts and all) from a superbly talented historian. David Brown has written a terrific book about the fascinating character of Henry Adams. He not only gets at the heart of Adams’s rich ideas but also the context in which they emerged, making the book a great work of American history and a great biography too. Just as important, The Last American Aristocrat is beautifully written and a fun read.” —Kevin Mattson, author of We’re Not Here to Entertain and Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University

“As a historian, David Brown not only gives us a meticulously researched and accessible account of Henry Adams’s long and remarkable life and career, he also skillfully provides a detailed and illuminating picture of the social, political, and cultural context of Adams’s times. Brown is clear-eyed and thought-provoking in depicting Adams as uneasily and often precariously poised between the colonial past of his illustrious forebears and the industrialized and modernist present through which he lived.” —Jackson R. Bryer, professor emeritus of English, University of Maryland, and president, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

From the Publisher

★ 10/01/2020

Three years before his death, historian, writer, and frequent traveler Henry Adams (1838–1918) observed, "I've outlived at least three quite distinct worlds since 1838." In this masterful biography, Brown (history, Elizabethtown Coll.; Paradise Lost) appreciates Adams's strengths and understands—and explains—his shortcomings. Two of Adams's ancestors served as U.S. president and his father served as ambassador to the UK in the turbulent days of the American Civil War. By Henry's time, though, his family's influence in national politics had waned, nor was Henry suited to political life. The author successfully shows how Adams's life and experiences were influenced by a newly industrialized and democratized nation. His writing apprenticeship began early; as a teenager, he helped his father edit the ten-volume Works of John Adams. Brown effectively shows how his subject's views evolved over time, from writing the award-winning The Education of Henry Adams (1918) to working as a journalist in Washington, DC to holding a professorship at Harvard. Yet, he doesn't shy away from dark times, such as the travels after the death of his wife. VERDICT This is a model of critical biography that will be appreciated by all lovers of history or biography.—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

Jacques Roy’s fine narration of Brown’s excellent biography of historian Henry Adams is commendable on every scale, a model of pacing, expression, and tone. It’s no fault of the biographer or narrator that Adams turns out to be not as attractive a personality as his reputation in American letters would have led you to expect. Grandson of one American president and great-grandson of another, his is the last stage in a family saga that spans a century and a half of America’s most formative years. He’s the one who wrote history, rather than made it. Together, biographer and narrator make fascinating a man who was, in life, a constricted, bigoted, and, in many ways, unsympathetic figure. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile

Jacques Roy’s fine narration of Brown’s excellent biography of historian Henry Adams is commendable on every scale, a model of pacing, expression, and tone. It’s no fault of the biographer or narrator that Adams turns out to be not as attractive a personality as his reputation in American letters would have led you to expect. Grandson of one American president and great-grandson of another, his is the last stage in a family saga that spans a century and a half of America’s most formative years. He’s the one who wrote history, rather than made it. Together, biographer and narrator make fascinating a man who was, in life, a constricted, bigoted, and, in many ways, unsympathetic figure. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2020-07-22
A fresh, top-notch biography of Henry Adams (1838-1918).

Noted historian Brown once again trains his perceptive eye on a major American thinker. As a member of a powerful political family, Adams possessed the strengths and prejudices of his class, and his work both chronicled and reflected the decline of the Boston-centered gentry. Elevating self-pity—what Brown calls his “sense of displacement”—into a unique sensibility and generalizing from it, Adams made irony into a distinctive, signature style. His principal historical works—those about the Jefferson and Madison administrations and Gothic culture—are unrivaled masterpieces. Yet despite a backward-looking mind, Brown notes that Adams also evinced traits of a modern man who, despite his often suffocating emotionlessness, responded to new experiences and historical developments with an open mind—but always critically. Unfortunately, like most members of his class and circle, he was also deeply anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, anti-labor, and racist. “I believe,” writes Brown, “that to understand much of America’s history, and more specifically its movement in the late nineteenth century toward an imperial, industrial identity, one both increasingly beholden to technology and concerned with the fate of the white race, is to understand Henry Adams.” The author presents his “critical profile” of Adams, a man of “fluidity of identity,” with the acuity that marks his earlier works. Few write so confidently of the American historical writings produced by both academic and freelance writers. When Brown leaves American precincts, as he must to write about Adams’ late-life masterpiece, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he is less sure-footed, but that weakness only modestly mars the book’s many strengths. It takes up easy company with related works on Adams by Ernest Samuels, Garry Wills, and Edward Chalfant. In deftly capturing a man of enormous scholarly achievement, near-tragic limitations, and symbolic significance in American history, Brown gives us another fine biographical study.

A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history.

Kirkus Reviews