The Education of Henry Adams

Written in the third person, this strange and searching autobiography follows one of America’s most privileged men as he tries, and largely fails, to make sense of the century unfolding around him. Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, treats his own life as an experiment in education, measuring the classical schooling of his youth against the electric, industrial world of dynamos and telegraphs he lived to see. The result is part memoir, part meditation on history, science, and the accelerating forces he felt no learning could keep pace with. Privately printed in 1907 and released to the public in 1918, it won the Pulitzer Prize and stands as a landmark of American letters. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.