About the Author

Noted American historian wrote his nine-volume (1889-1891) and also a famous autobiography, This oldest and most distinguished family in Boston produced and , two American presidents, and thus gave Henry the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning in the worlds of both practical men and affairs as a journalist and an assistant to his father, an American diplomat in Washington and London, and of ideas as a prolific writer, as the editor of the prestigious , and as a professor of medieval, European, and American history at Harvard, Adams of the few men of his era attempted to understand art, thought and culture as one complex force field of interacting energies. He published , his masterwork in this dazzling effort, in 1904. Taken together with his other books, Adams in this spiritual, monumental volume attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature to attempt to understand the place of the individual in society. They constitute one of the greatest philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature.

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