![]() ![]() "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. 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. 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. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. ![]() ![]() But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. ![]()
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