American · 1838–1918
Henry Adams was an American historian, novelist and man of letters. Born in Boston in 1838, he was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. He studied at Harvard, served as private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London during the Civil War, and later taught medieval and American history at Harvard, where he edited the North American Review. He wrote the nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, two anonymous novels, Democracy and Esther, and a study of medieval architecture and thought, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. His autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was privately printed in 1907 and published after his death in 1918. It won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. Adams lived in Washington near Lafayette Square, traveled widely, and was married to Marian Hooper, who died by suicide in 1885. He died in Washington in 1918.