The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
| Industrial Age |
|---|
 The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
|
American History > Industrial Age > Gilded Age
A revelatory biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals of his era, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation.
Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist.
Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted powerful figures, including Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era.
The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence.
Presenting intimate and insightful details of a fascinating and unusual American life and a new window on nineteenth century US history, The Last American Aristocrat shows us a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before.
Other Similar Books
Other suggestions on the subject of Gilded Age.
- The Gilded Girl (by: Coleman, Alyssa, Gilded Age, magic, MG)
- Audacity (by: Crowder, Melanie, Gilded Age, Activism, UMG, YA)
- Chasing Secrets (by: Choldenko, Gennifer, Anti-Chinese Immigration, Gilded Age, UMG)
- The Golem and the Jinni (by: Wecker, Helene, Immigrants, Gilded Age, Jewish History, YA, A)
- The Last Days of Night (by: Moore, Graham, Technology, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Nikolas Tesla, Gilded Age, YA, A)
- These Shallow Graves (by: Donnelly, Jennifer, Gilded Age, YA, A)
- The City Beautiful (by: Polydoros, Aden, Gilded Age, Jewish Immigration, Chicago World's Fair, YA, A)
- Jackaby (by: Ritter, William, Gilded Age, YA, A)
- The Mad Girls of New York: A Nellie Bly Novel (by: Rodale, Maya, Gilded Age, Writing, Journalism, Nellie Bly, Adult)
- The Devil in the White City (by: Larson, Erik, Gilded Age, Chicago World's Fair, A)
- The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams (by: Brown, David S., Henry Adams, Gilded Age, A)