Henry Adams - Gore Vidal - American History

 Thanks to Gore Vidal, I knew of Henry Adams. Thanks to the interlibrary loan program, I got to read Adams' The Education of Henry Adams while in prison. Today, I learned Garry Wills, a decades long favorite author, has written about Adams: Henry Adams and the Making of America.

The review ends with this:

Wills demonstrates throughout that Adams’s work on Jefferson and Madison deserves greater attention because Adams was, simply put, a superb and highly original historian. For example, he was the first to pursue the story of the Jefferson and Madison administrations from an international perspective. Adams gives us not only Jefferson and Madison, but he also gives us Godoy, Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and Pitt. He was able to achieve this because he was at the forefront of an important sea change in American historical methodology, spending large amounts of his personal fortune gaining access to European archives. That is why Adams’s history is more than fluffy claims about this and that, more than weak inferences and conjecture. It is centered on documents, chased down on both sides of the Atlantic, painstakingly collected, and copied by hand. In short, Wills’s Adams was a seminal figure in the birth and development of professional American historical scholarship.

None of this, however, should obscure the chief reason for returning to Adams’s nine volumes, which is that they offer the pleasures of truly great literature, superbly imagined, written with lucidity and ease, and dripping with irony. With Henry Adams and the Making of America, Garry Wills proves himself to be a match for his subject, offering us the unusual example of one man’s history book about another man’s history books that is rich in conception, vigorous in an argument, and a sheer intellectual delight.

As for more on Vidal and Adams, check out this article (pdf). 

sch 1/1/23