With a new suit of clothes, Adams implies, on a body that has no more power and mystery than a manikin, you have the phoniness of an education in the 19th Century. Adams' Preface sets the reader up brilliantly for this journey (to follow) into his rant against the mechanical replacing the spiritual. In conclusion, another critic, Louis Kronenberger, writes in The New Republic (Kronenberger, 1939) that Adams' "most responsive readers" were those following World War I who had "reason to believe that American life had failed them." And to those intellectuals in America who "still retained...vestiges of the American moralist," Adams "grim citation of a century's crimes and blunders helped explain the plight of the modern world."

When looking...

The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1930.

Hahn, Herbert F. "The Education of Henry Adams' Reconsidered." College English 24.6

1963): 444-449.

Kronenberger, Louis. "The Education of Henry Adams': The Sixth of the 'Books That Changed

Our Minds'." The New Republic LXXXXVIII.1267 (1939): 155-58.