Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams: His Second Life, 1862-1891

This Second Volume of the life of Henry Adams tells a rounded story of a man, a marriage, the epic history he wrote, and the covert role he played in the politics of late nineteenth-century America. Based on new evidence - unpublished, unrecognized, or misinterpreted letters and writings of Adams, and information from people who knew him personally - it gives a startlingly different picture and an unexpectedly new experience of Adams's life. This book, a continuation of volume one, Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams, His First Life, 1838-1862, follows Henry into his matured years - first as a Harvard professor, later as a writer and behind-the-scenes Washington power. With his marriage to Marian (Clover) Hooper in 1872, his story becomes the biography of a remarkable union, shattered by Clover's suicide in 1885. Mr. Chalfant documents a respectful and tender partnership that strengthened Adams and enabled him to continue his work in spite of the devastation of his wife's death. This is also a book about Adams's History of the United States: its conception and growth; how it came to be published; what it says that is important and new; and how it consciously draws on earlier epics - Homer's Iliad and Milton's Paradise Lost - in creating an American mythology. Mr. Chalfant is also the first to disclose and delve into Henry Adams's secret actions as diplomat, politician, interceder in presidential elections (from 1868 to 1884), discoverer of the full nature of the gold conspiracy of 1869 with its attendant impeachable offenses and murder, and successful opponent of a putative Blaine administration. The extraordinary scope of this book takes in a whole world - not only of national politics and diplomacy, but also finance, invention, literature, history, science, art, architecture, travel, and exploration. New perspectives on Napoleon, Albert Gallatin, J.Q. Adams, Karl Marx, Jay Gould, Ulysses and Julia Grant, Congressman Garfield, architect H.H. Richardson, as well as Henry's friends John Hay, Clarence King, and Elizabeth Cameron, among others, filter through the rich fabric of Adams's life and times.… (more)