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Hardcover. Condizione: New. Condizione sovraccoperta: New. 1st Edition. BRILLIANT: CLASSIC: SUPERB: NEW LOA First Edition hardcover (Orig. 1983) Second Printing (c. 1998): NEW handsomely-designed mylar-protected LOA jacket w/ sharp NEW edges & corners & showig $27.50 pub. price at bottom-right inside-front flyleaf, NEW navy-blue Brillianta silk-finish linen-over-boards cover w/ sharp NEW edges & corners & titles & LOA-colophon handsomely gold-stamped on spine, IMMACULATE smooth-cut text-block exterior, IMPECCABLE distinctive white-on-blue LOA-logo-patterned card-stock end-papers, PRISTINE interior handsomely printed in 10-point Linotron Galliard on SUPERB unblemished acid-free Olin-Nyalite opaque archival paper * 5.0" x 8.12" x 1.78", 0.90 kg, 1252 pp. * CONTENTS: Democracy (1), Esther (185), Mont Saint Michel & Chartres (337), The Education of Henry Adams (715), Poems (1193); Chronology (1209), Note on the Texts (1217), Notes (1229) * ABOUT THE BOOK: This LOA volume includes the best-known works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful & original minds to illuminate the American scene from the Civil War to WW I. Here for the first time in a single volume, these works show the many forms (fiction, poetry, autobiography, philosophical & historical speculation) in which Adams gave expression to his vision of the meaning of the unsettling changes in American life & values. Each of the 2 novels, "Democracy" & "Esther", chooses a woman on whom to center the effects of social change. In "Democracy", Madeleine Lee, an emancipated & idealistic young widow, moves to Washington to learn the nature of political power & is disillusioned upon discovering the intrigues of rampant corruption. The free-thinking heroine in "Esther", caught in the warfare between science & religion, finds that she cannot surrender her moral independence, even to marry a clergyman. Adams, though a man of the modern world, remained in temperament a child of the 18th century, his political ideals shaped by his presidential ancestors, great-grandfather John Adams & grandfather John Quincy Adams. The failure of those ideals to withstand the challenges of an industrialized America drove him to seek refuge in the study of the medieval age of faith in France. Out of it came his skeptic's "Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres". Her presence dominates the book that followed: "Mont Saint Michel & Chartres". In evocative & sensitive prose Adams moves from the architecture, sculpture, & stained glass of Chartres to the religion, literature, politics, social order, & crusades of the 11th, 12th, & 13th centuries. Adams translates the poetry of courtly love & recounts the drama of Eleanor of Aquitaine's life & the timeless love of Abelard & Heloise. The narrative rises at the end to the brilliantly re-enacted drama of St. Thomas Aquinas' victory over the rival philosophers. If "Mont Saint Michel" portrayed a world unified by a common faith, "The Education of Henry Adams" portrayed a world irresistibly moving toward chaos. The world once unified by the Virgin was now ruled by the impersonal Dynamo & already confronted by the "metaphysical bomb" of radium & the prospect of infinite energy for man's use. Adams balances, w/ extraordinary urbanity & wit, the rival claims he found as much in himself as in modern civilization. Together, these 2 works still pose an urgent question: Can the human mind ultimately control the monstrous aggregates of power which it has wrung from nature? * ERNEST SAMUELS (1903-1996), volume editor, was emeritus professor of English at Northwestern University & author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 3 vol. biography of Henry Adams. JAYNE N. SAMULES, co-editor, was an assistant editor of the Letters of Henry Adams. * THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an award-winning, nonprofit program dedicated to publishing America's best & most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts, & restoring America's literary heritage in "the finest-looking, longest-lasting edition ever made" (New Republic).