Writings of Henry Adams

The program looks at the Gilded Age with an exploration of the works of Henry Adams, including his Pulitzer Prize winning "The Education of Henry Adams". Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. He graduated from Harvard in 1858 and embarked on a grand tour of Europe. From 1861 to 1868 he acted as his father’s private secretary in London, where his father was serving as a diplomat. On several trips to France, Adams examined medieval Christendom, and in the much-admired Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913) he described the medieval worldview as reflected in its cathedrals. The Education Of Henry Adams (1918) remains Adams’s best-known work and one of the most distinguished of all autobiographies; it was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1919, and in 2000 a distinguished panel named it the greatest American work of nonfiction of the 20th century. close