The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

Time to Read
8 hrs 41 mins

Reading Time

8 hrs 41 mins

How long to read The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams?

The estimated word count of The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams is 130,200 words.

A person reading at the average speed of 250 words/min, will finish the book in 8 hrs 41 mins. At a slower speed of 150 words/min, they will finish it in 14 hrs 28 mins. At a faster speed of 450 words/min, they will finish it in 4 hrs 50 mins.

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams - 130,200 words
Reading Speed Time to Read
Slow 150 words/min 14 hrs 28 mins
Average 250 words/min 8 hrs 41 mins
Fast 450 words/min 4 hrs 50 mins
The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by David S. Brown
Authors
David S. Brown

More about The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

130,200 words

Word Count

for The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

464 pages

Pages
Hardcover: 464 pages

14 hours

Audiobook length


Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A revelatory biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals of his era, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation.Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted powerful figures, including Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Presenting intimate and insightful details of a fascinating and unusual American life and a new window on nineteenth century US history, The Last American Aristocrat shows us a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before.