Happy birthday, Henry Brooks Adams

Henry Brooks Adams -- Harvard graduation photo. Adams lived to be 80 years old.

It is the birthday of journalist and historian Henry Brooks Adams (1868), whose posthumously-published The Education of Henry Adams (1918) won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. It tops the Modern Library’s list of the best 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. It deals with the author’s transition from the 19th century to the 20th. Adams also wrote the nine-volume History of the United States 1801-1817 (1889). It covers the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. President John Quincy Adams was his grandfather and President John Adams was his great-grandfather.