HENRY ADAMS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND THE VOID
HENRY ADAMS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND THE VOID

Summary/Abstract: In Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (1992), Paul John Eakin makes the interesting remark that “The Education of Henry Adams (1907) is probably the first autobiography to make the relation between an individual life and history its presiding theme, and it remains the most self-conscious attempt to provide a theory for this kind of life story, “a new sense of the historicity of the individual life” (145, 147). In particular, the American writer endeavors to shed light on the effects that one's continuously changing personal experience has on the concepts of self, identity, and knowledge.

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