The Last American Aristocrat

Abstract

Stephen Lennon evaluates David S. Brown’s biography The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams, emphasizing Brown’s portrayal of Adams as a figure suspended between historical epochs. Lennon highlights Brown’s central thesis that Adams straddled the post-colonial American past and the emergent modern world, combining aristocratic inheritance with intellectual adaptability. The review traces Adams’s political and literary engagements—from his historical writing and diplomatic service to his ambivalent relationship with democracy, slavery, and imperial expansion—while noting Brown’s measured attention to Adams’s limitations as well as his brilliance. Lennon further situates Henry Adams in a lineage that extends to Norman Mailer, drawing suggestive parallels between their narrative strategies, political outsider status, and ambitions to intervene in national discourse. Ultimately, the review presents Brown’s biography as a substantial and judicious reassessment of Adams’s life and legacy, one that enriches understanding of American intellectual history and the genealogy of modern literary authority.