ADAMS, HENRY BROOKS

Writer, novelist, and historian; b. Boston, Mass., Feb. 16, 1838; d. Washington, D.C., March 27, 1918. He was descended on both sides from wealthy and distinguished New England ancestors, two of whom were presidents of the United States. He was raised as a Unitarian, but rejected his Protestant orientation because he felt it was complacent ("Boston had solved the universe …") and unrealistic ("all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time … were not worth discussing"). His most significant effort in a lifetime of inquiry was to understand and recover the religious instinct.

At Harvard College (1854–58) he was influenced by Louis Agassiz to devote himself to the intellectual life. He sailed for Germany to study law, but decided to become a writer instead. He returned to America in 1860, and served as private secretary to his father, Charles F. Adams, who had been reelected to Congress. When the elder Adams was appointed minister to Great Britain, Henry accompanied him to London (1861–68). To strike the strongest blows for reform, he became a freelance journalist and covered the Washington political scene (1868–70). He was appointed assistant professor of medieval history at Harvard (1870) and was named editor of the North American Review (1870–76). In 1872 he married Marian Hooper.

In 1877, Adams moved back to Washington, where he devoted himself full time to writing and to his self appointed function as "stable-companion to statesmen."

The next eight years were highly productive. He started the monumental History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 v. 1889–91), which has been hailed by some as the greatest work of its kind since gibbon's. He was also an able biographer, author of Albert Gallatin (1879), a study of Jefferson's secretary of the treasury, and John Randolph, a partisan view of the brilliant Southern spokesman. In later life Adams returned to biography, publishing The Life of George Cabot Lodge (1911). Both of his novels were published anonymously. Democracy, An American Novel (1880), a best-selling succès de scandale, was a satire on the Washington of his time, centering on the career of Mrs. Lightfoot Lee. Esther (1884) also features a cultivated and charming heroine, probably modeled on his wife, who makes an earnest but futile effort to accept a religious view of life.

His wife's suicide in 1885 was a severe blow to his psychic equilibrium. Although Adams was by nature an inveterate traveler, his journey to Japan (1886) with his close friend, artist John la farge, was meant, in part, to be recuperative. With La Farge he visited Hawaii, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and Europe (1890–92). This journey occasioned one of his most interesting and curious volumes, Memoirs of Marau Taaroa (1893), a history of Tahiti from a non-Western perspective, revised and reprinted (1901) as Memoirs of Arii Taimai E. During the 1890s he spent much of his time abroad, traveling from the Near East to Russia and Scandinavia. In his mid 60s he undertook the completion of his two most important books—Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1902), a study of medievalism rather than medieval history, and The Education of Henry Adams (1906), at once an intellectual autobiography in the third person and a study of 20thcentury multiplicity. Both books were privately printed. "The Rule of Phase Applied to History" (1908) and "A Letter to American Teachers of History" (1910) were collected along with an earlier essay, "The Tendency of History" (1894), in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919). In 1912 he suffered a heart attack, but recovered sufficiently to go to France, where he remained until the outbreak of World War I. In 1918 he returned to Washington and died there.

Adams was not generally regarded as a literary figure until Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education won an audience after his death. He prophesied the "darkening chaos of the modern world" in The Education, predicting the moral bankruptcy of a materialistic society. Using the 12th century, presented poetically and passionately in Chartres, as a touchstone by which to judge the 20th century, he looked with nostalgia at the unity of that far time, the Middle Ages, and with fear at the "multiplicity" of the time to come. The Virgin was the chief symbol in his studies of 13th-century unity, "the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in the unified universe"; the Dynamo symbolized 20th-century multiplicity, marked by a "great influx of new forces … violently coercive" and "rapid in acceleration."

Bibliography: j. blanck, Bibliography of American Literature, 4 v. (New Haven 1955–63) v.1 contains a descriptive listing of separate editions. Literary History of the United States, ed. r. e. spiller et al., 3 v. (New York 1948) v.3 and its Bibliography Supplement, ed. r. m. ludwig (New York 1959), the best general bibliography. h. adams, Letters of Henry Adams, 1858–1918, ed. w. c. ford, 2 v. (Boston 1930–38); Henry Adams and His Friends, ed. h. d. cater (Boston 1947). w. c. ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–65, 2 v. (Boston 1920). e. samuels, The Young Henry Adams (Cambridge, Mass. 1948); Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, Mass. 1958); Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, Mass. 1964). e. stevenson, Henry Adams, a Biography (New York 1955). w. h. jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven 1952). j. c. levenson, The Mind and Heart of Henry Adams (Boston 1957). y. winters, In Defense of Reason (New York 1947).

[j. schwartz]