The Letters of Henry Adams, Volumes 4-6: 1892-1918 - Hardcover

Adams, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674526864 ISBN 13: 9780674526860

Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Ernest Samuels is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English, Emeritus, Northwestern University and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Review:

This magnificent edition of letters deserves several reviews-as a monumental scholarly achievement, as an illuminating contribution to American history, as a brilliant example of the art of letter writing, and most of all as an extraordinary personal record of an eminent American, the grandson of one president and greatgrandson of another...In all, a colossal achievement?
--Edward Condren (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Adams was one of the great letter writers of the English language. Proof is now offered in [this] major publishing event?
--Otto Friedrich (Time)

Henry Adams has become 'an indispensable figure in American thought' during the 60 years, 1858-1918, covered by his correspondence. No mind more richly furnished and widely ranging appeared among his American contemporaries Treasures of The Letters depend on what the reader is seeking. If it is autobiography, there is far more of that here than in The Education of 'Henry Adams...If it is the period and its drama of events, here was a reporter with a box seat and inside information. If it should be the life of the mind, Adams read everything of consequence and usually knew the authors. His picture of transatlantic society is filled out by foreign correspondence and residence abroad about half the time. Seekers for the exotic will find nothing richer in travel literature than his diary-letters from the long stay in the South Pacific islands. And the universal taste for love letters is served by the long withheld or doctored letters to Elizabeth Cameron, the beautiful young wile of the senator from Pennsylvania?
--C. Vann Woodward (The Washington Post)

Adams's letters...reveal an elegant style, a supple intelligence, and a remarkable capacity for observation...His accounts of Samoan life (1890-91) are amazingly precise and sensitive evocations of an alien culture. The letters also show Adams's sustained capacity for loyalty, tenderness, and warmth toward family and friends. His playful letters to children are particularly touching; they express a sensibility that is almost entirely suppressed in his Education.
--T.J. Jackson Lears (The Wilson Quarterly)

To say that one awaits the concluding volumes of these letters with greedy impatience is to understate the case
--John Clive (The American Scholar)

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0674526864
• ISBN 13: 9780674526860
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 736
• Editor: Levenson J. C., Samuels Ernest, Vandersee Charles, Winner Viola H.