Henry Adams: The Major Phase

With this volume, covering the years 1890-1918, Ernest Samuels completes his definitive study of Henry Adams which is at once biography, literary history, and criticism. Written on the same comprehensive scale as its predecessors, the book utilizes an immense wealth of unpublished manuscript material, much of it hitherto restricted or inaccessible, or in some cases expurgated or suppressed. Of all these extremely useful new sources, probably the most important papers from the biographical point of view are the brilliant and romantic letters Henry Adams wrote to Elizabeth Cameron in 1890-91. As he has done from the beginning, Mr. Samuels makes relatively little use of The Education of Henry Adams, preferring to take Adams out of the half-lights and self-deprecations of his own great book, to show him in the round, to disencumber his career from the formulas of his various theories of history, and to tell the full story of his behind-the-scenes participation in palace politics he method is particularly rewarding and important here because the narrative of the Education ends in 1905, and nearly half of the book deals with the remaining thirteen years of Adams's life. To many readers the story of Henry Adams's long devotion to Elizabeth Cameron, with its curious resemblance to some of George Bernard Shaw's affairs will come as a surprising and welcome humanization of that wraithlike personification of intellect that emerges as the protagonist of the Education. Mr. Samuels examines the central bearing of this relationship on one of the main themes of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Mr. Samuels admits to having been preoccupied with Henry Adams for twenty-two years and says that throughout that time, as our own world has been transformed by war and revolution, he has been continually amazed at the relevance of Adams's thought, however wrongheaded and ambiguous it could sometimes be, to the developments of our time. Holding to an integral view of Henry Adams through all three volumes of this great work, Mr. Samuels has re-created the growth, maturity, and second harvest of an extraordinarily gifted and perceptive man whose long and varied career was something considerably more than a straightforward progression from one set of thoughts and experiences to the next. In exploring so completely the full range of Henry Adams's responses to the temper and events of his world, Mr. Samuels contributes notably to American social and intellectual history in the course of presenting a transcendent biography.