The Education of Henry Adams, written by America’s greatest historian and heir to America’s first political family, was greeted on its posthumous release as the finest of American autobiographies. For a century it has been routinely characterized as one of world literature’s extraordinary life narratives. However, The Education isn’t truly a work of autobiography. It is a meditation on a life formed by a family tradition that wraps itself around a cultural critique of the age, and around speculations on a philosophy of history.