Henry Adams owes his popular reputation to a single work, The Education of Henry Adams. That book, which was privately printed in 1907 but not commercially published until just after the author's death in 1918, quickly made Adams famous, as he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1919. At the same time, the sudden notoriety of this one book put into critical eclipse the substantial literary work that Adams had accomplished earlier: essays, biographies, novels, letters, and especially a magisterial nine-volume historical study of the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison--a classic of American historiography. In the years since 1919, some of that shadow has disappeared, and a larger, fairer-minded sense of Henry Adams 's proper place in the cultural history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has gradually emerged. With the passage of time, we have come to see that Adams stands apart even while...