A flawed and conflicted man Adams surely was, but he was also an undeniably gifted writer on everything from early American history to Gothic architecture. As Adams grew older, he retreated further and further into pessimism and intellectual solitude, taking as his moral and aesthetic lodestar thirteenth-century Europe-a passion he described eloquently in his book Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904). Though he was a believer in the tenets of democracy that his ancestors had put in place, he was a committed skeptic of democracy’s survival in the face of corruption and cultural malaise he inveighed against American capitalism and financial opportunism, though he was also content to support himself with steady earnings from the stock market. A scion of the renowned Adams family of presidents and statesmen, Adams struggled with the privilege this position granted him his entire life. Few figures of nineteenth-century America are as hard to pin down as Henry Adams.
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