Henry Adams

Esther Henry Adams

Does a spirited young painter who's fallen in love with a preacher need to comprise her own personal convictions to marry him? Find out in this surprisingly insightful work by Henry Adams, who originally published the work under the nom de plume, Frances Compton Snow. While Esther's plot may sound like one pulled from today's romantic comedies, Adams creates a story filled with tension and personality clashes, painted against a backdrop of arguments about religion, science, art and poetry. Henry Adams was born into one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Boston, a family which had produced two American presidents, giving him the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning both in the world of practical men and affairs (as a journalist and an assistant to his father, who was an American diplomat in Washington and London), and in the world of ideas (as a prolific writer, the editor of the prestigious North American Review, and a professor of medieval, European, and American history at Harvard), Adams was one of the few men of his era who attempted to understand art, thought, culture, and history as one complex force field of interacting energies.