Born in 1838 into one of the oldest and most distinguished
families in Boston, a family which had produced two American
presidents, Henry Adams had the opportunity to pursue a
wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of
his life. Functioning both in the world of practical men and
afffairs (as a journalist and an assistant to his father, who was
an American diplomat in Washinton and London), and in the world of
ideas (as a prolific writer, the editor of the prestigious North
American Review, and a professor of medieval, european, and
American history at Harvard), Adams was one of the few men of his
era who attempted to understand art, thought, culture, and history
as one complex force field of interacting energies. His two
masterworks in this dazzling effort are Mont Saint Michel and
Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, published one
after the other in 1904 and 1907. Taken together they may be read
as Adams' spiritual autobiography—two monumental volumes in which
he attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his
knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy,
art, and literature in order to attempt to understand the
individual's place in history and society. They constitute one of
the greatest historical and philosophical meditations on the human
condition in all of literature.
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