cover image Henry Adams

Henry Adams

Ernest Samuels. Belknap Press, $45 (612pp) ISBN 978-0-674-38735-5

The aim of this masterful revision and abridgment of Samuel's three-volume, prize-winning biography, completed in 1964, is to bring into sharper focus the personality and career of this remarkable historian-biographer-novelist-journalist and thus get behind what Adams called his ``shield of protection,'' namely his History of Henry Adams. In a rich, stimulating study Samuels reveals the complex character of the author of the great History , the Educaton and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres ; and we see Adams in his various roles as Harvard undergraduate, London correspondent, teacher, muckraking Washington journalist, political gadfly and, after the suicide of his wife, compulsive world traveler. A man of broad cultural interests and a close friend of Henry James, Adams was at the hub of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. He was courteous, combative, a passionate seeker after knowledge and a champion of women. He was also, despite a certain mystical bent, one of the first to attempt the scientific study of history. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)