Sometime after he began writing the Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Adams decided to create a companion piece, which became the Education of Henry Adams. (For thorough discussions of the inception of the Education, and the history of the text, see Jean Gooder's "Note on the Text," Penguin Classics edition and Samuels', The Major Phase.) The work was completed in 1906 and a private edition of one hundred copies was printed late that year but dated by Adams's "Preface" as February 16, 1907. The avowed purpose of the volume was to provide balance for the Chartres, which considers medieval philosophy and the unity found in the architecture and icons of the cathedrals. The Education deals with the necessary education, scientific method, and modern multiplicity of the early 1900s.
Copies of the book were sent to those discussed in the text, with a request that each strike out anything found objectionable. According to Ernest Samuels, three copies were returned. In a letter dated February 9, 1908, William James, the prominent psychologist and philosopher, and an occasional correspondent with Adams, responded to the work in detail. Although he found the boyhood section "really superlative," he complained that there was a "hodge-podge of world-fact, private fact, philosophy, irony, (with the word 'education' stirred in too much for my appreciation!)." He protests, as many readers have since, that much of the history is merely hinted at, so that the reader is at a loss as to Adams's meaning. Finally, he questions the efficacy of the dynamic theory of history. Perhaps, he concludes, the approach is more suitable to a study of physical existence. No other readers appear to have had the insight or the courage to write so bluntly to Adams.
Charles W. Eliot, the Harvard president who hired Adams as an assistant professor of history in 1870, is treated well in the Education but was annoyed by Adams's condemnation of the institution. He returned his copy, but his comments have been lost. In the company of another professor, he later called Adams and the Education "[an] overrated man and a much overrated book."
