The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Oxford World's Classics)
Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about  their own abilities. ButThe Education of Henry Adamsis surely one of the  few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and  ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston  in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed  alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors  nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from  the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived  was colonial," we are told,revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England  nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as  a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they  saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition;  the duty was unchanged.Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet  there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education  is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he  might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the  same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and  sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adamspère et filsto London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist,historian,novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding isThe Education of Henry Adamsitself, which remains  among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It  contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture,  and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as  a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing  glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white  kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, theAutobiographyconfers upon its author precisely that prize he  felt had always eluded him: success.--James Marcus--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.