The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

ADAMS, Henry (intro. Henry Seidel Canby; illus. Samuel Chamberlain). The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1970.

Large Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. Twelve etchings by Samuel Chamberlain throughout. Notes pamphlet laid in. Collector's Library of Famous Editions. Reprinting the Limited Editions Club edition of 1942. Originally privately printed, Washington D.C., 1907; published posthumously, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

Henry Adams (1838–1918) was born into American history rather than merely living within it. His great-grandfather was John Adams, the second President; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams, the sixth; his father, Charles Francis Adams, served as American Minister to Britain during the Civil War, during which period Henry served as his secretary and watched the diplomacy of that conflict from the inside. He was subsequently a journalist, a professor of medieval history at Harvard, an editor of the North American Review, and a novelist — and then, in middle age, something harder to classify: a thinker whose subject was the problem of understanding history as a whole, and whose attempt to find a unifying principle for the chaos of modern American life produced two of the most remarkable books in the American intellectual tradition.

The Education of Henry Adams was privately printed in an edition of a hundred copies and distributed to friends in 1907, when Adams was sixty-nine. He died in 1918 without having authorised its commercial publication; it appeared posthumously that year and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1919. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it first on its list of the 100 best works of nonfiction of the twentieth century.

The book is formally an autobiography, but it subverts the form at every turn. Adams refers to himself throughout in the third person, as "Adams" — a distancing device that transforms self-description into a kind of case study. The education of the title is primarily what Adams did not learn and could not learn: how to navigate a world that had outrun every framework of understanding available to him. The antithesis that structures the book — the unity of the medieval world, exemplified by the Virgin and the great cathedrals of the twelfth century, against the multiplicity and incoherence of the modern world, exemplified by the dynamo at the Paris Exposition of 1900 — is one of the most searching meditations on modernity produced in the first century of industrial civilisation.

The etchings by Samuel Chamberlain (1895–1975), the American architectural etcher and photographer, were produced for the Limited Editions Club edition of 1942 — the source for this Easton Press reproduction — and provide visual accompaniment suited to Adams's interest in the built environments of historical periods. The introduction is by Henry Seidel Canby (1878–1961), the literary critic and co-founder of the Saturday Review of Literature.

Near fine. Some very minor and sporadic markings to gilt edges; otherwise clean and bright throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000602