The Critical Reception of Henry Adams - Kevin J. Hayes

Titre: The Critical Reception of Henry Adams - Kevin J. Hayes
extracted text: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF HENRY ADAMS

Kevin J. Hayes, Ph.D.
University of Central Oklahoma / Emeritus Professor

The Library of America is a landmark in the history of American literature. It was
launched in 1982 with the release of the first Herman Melville volume, which contains
three book-length works: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. Upon its launch R. W. B. Lewis averred
that the publication of the Library of America could be “the cultural event of our epoch.”
Though the purpose of this paper is to survey the critical reception of Henry Adams’s
work, including the Memoirs of Arii Taimai, his book about Tahiti, it is important to note
that Omoo, Melville’s book about Tahiti, helped initiate the single greatest collection of
American literature ever published. In other words, Tahiti plays an important role in the
story of American literature.33
Reviewing the first Melville volume, Malcolm Cowley called the Library of America
the “American Pléiade” and, in so doing, acknowledged its French inspiration. Patterned
on the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, the set of classic French literature Gallimard publishes
in Paris, the Library of America celebrates and perpetuates the finest writers in the nation’s history. Gallimard launched the Pléiade in 1931 with the first volume of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. Starting with a volume of Melville’s work, the Library of
America selected an author with commensurate literary stature. The Library of America
also parallels the Pléiade in terms of the physical quality of its volumes, using high-quality
bible paper to squeeze over a thousand pages of material between their covers.34
Though the Memoirs of Arii Taimai has not appeared in the Library of America,
Henry Adams is represented in the series by three volumes. The first, which appeared as
33 Herman Melville, Typee, A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo, A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; Mardi
and a Voyage Thither, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (Library of America, 1982); R. W. B. Lewis, “The Literary Americans,”
New Republic, May 19, 1982: 26.
34 Malcolm Cowley, “American Pléiade,” New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1982: 3; Charles Baudelaire,
Œuvres, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Gallimard, 1931).

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number 14 of the Library of America, contains four book-length works: Democracy, a novel of political intrigue set within the shadowy corridors of power in Washington, D.C.; Esther, a philosophical treatise masked as a romance novel; Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,
a contemplative book of travel Henry James praised for “its easy lucidity, its saturation
with its subject, its charmingly taken and kept, tone”; and The Education of Henry Adams,
his artfully-crafted autobiography, which Yvor Winters compared with a different Melville
work. In Winters’s view The Education of Henry Adams resembles Pierre: or, The Ambiguities in terms of its “willed confusion and religious horror.” When R. W. B. Lewis, who held
a loftier opinion of The Education of Henry Adams, heard about the contents of the first
Henry Adams volume in the Library of America prior to its release, he began to covet the
volume, calling it “infinite riches in a little room.”35
Winters was more complimentary when it came to Adams’s major historical work,
The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison. Comparing it with Edward Gibbon’s masterwork, Winters called Adams’s History
“the greatest historical work in English, with the probable exception of The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire.” Adams’s History has also appeared in the Library of America,
which split this massive work in two. History of the United States of America during the
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson appeared as number 31 in the Library of America, and
History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison as number 32. Both numbers appeared in 1986. Together the three volumes contain nearly four
thousand pages of material: a testament to the place that Henry Adams held as a major
American author into the 1980s.36
Whereas their place in the Library of America has revitalized the reputations of
some authors, Adams’s reputation declined precipitously in the late twentieth century.
The first edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, which appeared in 1979,
contained a fifty-page selection from The Education of Henry Adams, but the latest edition
contains a nine-page selection from “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Chapter 25 of The Education of Henry Adams.37 How did Adams go from a prominent figure in American literary
history to the author of a nine-page set piece? Or, in the parlance of popular music, how
did Henry Adams change from a major voice to a one-hit wonder?

35 Henry Adams, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (Library
of America, 1983); Henry James to Henry Adams, July 30, 1906, in The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry
Adams, 1877-1914, ed. George Monteiro (Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 70; Yvor Winters, The Anatomy
of Nonsense (New Directions, 1943), 35-36; Lewis, “Literary Americans,” 29.
36 Winters, Anatomy of Nonsense, 69; Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Earl N. Harbert (Library of America, 1986); Henry Adams, History of the United
States of America during the Administrations of James Madison, ed. Earl N. Harbert (Library of America, 1986).
37 Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Ronald
Gottesman, et al. (Norton, 1979), 2:964-1014; Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” The Norton Anthology
of American Literature, ed. Robert S. Levine, et al., 10th edition (Norton, 2022), 3:364-373.

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The publication of a multi-volume collected edition of letters has long been recognized as both a monument to important literary figures and a confirmation of their historical status. Adams is no exception. The publication of The Letters of Henry Adams began
in 1982, when the Belknap Press, the brawny arm of Harvard University Press, issued the
first three volumes of Adams’s Letters, which contain two thousand pages of letters covering Adams’s life through his trip to Tahiti. Three further volumes would follow. While
confirming his status as a major author, Adams’s published letters have proven his undoing.
Reviewing the first three volumes of letters, Norman Podhoretz found Adams singularly unlikeable, observing, “It is a tribute to his gifts as a writer that one can tolerate
his tiresome affectations and poses, not to mention his nihilistic attitudes, even for a few
hundred pages; but two thousand makes an inhuman demand.” This statement comes
early in his review. Later on Podhoretz quotes several letters that reveal Adams’s disturbing antisemitism. By the end of his review Podhoretz is ready to dismiss Adams altogether: “I see little of value that would be lost by allowing him to slip into the obscurity he
so often boasted of wishing to achieve.”38
The letters have also undermined Adams’s vaunted status as a historian. In 1861
after Abraham Lincoln appointed his father, Charles Francis Adams, minister to Great Britain, Henry Adams came along as his private secretary. He stayed in Europe throughout
the Civil War, during which he remained a fierce opponent of the South. Less than a year
after reaching England, he decided to challenge one of the South’s greatest heroes, Captain John Smith. Though conceived as an attack on the South, Adams’s essay about Smith
did not appear until after the Civil War, when the North American Review published it in
1867.39
The war had ended, but Adams gave Southerners no quarter. He made no attempt
to soften his approach to heal the wounds the war had opened. His attack on Smith remained uncompromising. Historians accepted Adams’s blatant assertion that Smith was
a liar who invented the popular story about Pocahontas rescuing him from certain death.
Adams’s vicious attack so thoroughly damaged Smith’s historical reputation that now,
over a century and a half later, it has yet to recover fully.40
Upon the article’s publication in 1867, readers were unaware of the sectional prejudice that motivated Adams’s essay. They assumed he was motivated by the objectivity
of the dedicated historian, but the publication of Adams’s letters revealed his sneaky
small-mindedness. Writing to his friend and fellow historian John Gorham Palfrey in late
38 Norman Podhoretz, “Henry Adams: The ‘Powerless’ Intellectual in America,” New Criterion, June 1983, 7:
13-15.
39 Henry Adams, “Captain John Smith,” North American Review 104 (January 1867): 1-30.
40 J. A. Leo Lemay, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (University of Georgia Press, 1992), 102-105.

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1861, Adams conveyed his uncertainty about proving Smith wrong, but after he started
the piece, he wrote Palfrey again, using the language of the battlefield to characterize the
essay. He called it “a rear attack, on the Virginia aristocracy, who will be utterly gravelled
by it if it is successful.”41
Though Adams’s reputation as a major American historian endured through the
1970s, the publication of his letters in the eighties coincided with the decline of his reputation. Far from indicating a great historian, his letters reveal Adams’s true colors. He was
a Northern propagandist, a narrow-minded bigot who used history as a weapon to batter
his political enemies.
After returning home from England, Adams accepted a teaching position at Harvard and also became editor of the North American Review. Under his editorial control,
the quarterly retained the reputation it had held since it was founded over fifty years earlier. The North American Review remained the voice of conservative New England, and its
contributors were largely comprised of Harvard dons and Boston divines. Ever since it was
founded during the Romantic era, forward-thinking authors considered this stuffy journal out of sync with the tastes of the times. Edgar Allan Poe advised Nathaniel Hawthorne
to throw all his back issues of the North American Review out the window to the pigs.42
Adams left the North American Review in 1876, Harvard the following year. He moved to Washington, D.C., where he could use the government archives to research his
extensive history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, which would ultimately
fill nine volumes. Adams’s letters express a condescension toward Jefferson and Madison reminiscent of his snarky attitude toward Captain John Smith. Thinking about their
presidential administrations, Adam used a clever simile to characterize both leaders. The
cleverness of his figure of speech only highlights his condescension: “I am at times almost
sorry that I ever undertook to write their history, for they appear like mere grass-hoppers,
kicking and gesticulating, on the middle of the Mississippi river.”43
The first volume of Adams’s history appeared in 1889. As in his correspondence,
his fine writing cannot mask his sectional bias. Adams concentrated on the Jefferson and
Madison administrations because he considered their era the time when the American
experiment had begun to crumble. In other words, it was not until President John Adams,
Henry’s great grandfather, left office and the Virginians reestablished control of the national leadership that the United States started going downhill.44

41 Henry Adams to John Gorham Palfrey, October 23, 1861, and March 20, 1862, in The Letters of Henry Adams,
ed. J. C. Levenson, et al. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 1:258-259, 287.
42 Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (Library of America, 1984), 588.
43 Henry Adams to Samuel J. Tilden, January 24, 1883, in Letters, 2:491.
44 David R. Contosta, “Adams, Henry,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty, and Mark C. Carnes
(Oxford University Press, 1999), 1:91.

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Even before the final volume of his history appeared, Adams grew weary of the
project. Of history-writing he was overtired. In August 1890 he left on a round-the-world
voyage with his artist friend John La Farge. This was the trip that brought him to Tahiti,
where he arrived in February 1891. He came with a letter of introduction from a prominent
British author who had previously visited Tahiti, Robert Louis Stevenson. Discovering that
there was no hotel in Papeete, Adams and La Farge moved into a cottage overlooking the
harbor.45
Beginning his first letter home from Papeete, Adams exclaimed, “Tahiti! does the
word mean anything to you? To me it has a perfume of its own, made up of utterly inconsequent associations; essence of the South Seas mixed with imaginations of at least forty
years ago; Herman Melville and Captain Cook head and heels with the French opera and
Pierre Loti.” Quoting this passage in The Melville Log, Jay Leyda acknowledged Tahiti as the
place where the histories of Adams and Melville intersected. Adams was obviously familiar with Typee or Omoo or both, and his memory of reading Melville in his youth helped
shape his initial understanding of Tahiti.46
After Adams and La Farge settled into the cottage, they were adopted into the family of Marau Taaroa, one of the daughters of the old chiefess of the Teva clan, Arii Taimai. Adams considered this round-the-world journey a break from history-writing, but
he soon found himself taking notes as he listened to Arii Taimai speak and her daughter
translate. Tahiti’s matriarchal society intrigued Adams. Perhaps Louis Zukofsky has explained his situation best: “Adams’s mind revelled in a society where women, under ‘primitive’ institutions, shared equal sovereignty with men; where they not only caused wars
but directed them.”47 Arii Taimai told the story of her ancestors and related what Adams
characterized as “long native legends about wonderful princesses and princes, who did
astonishing things in astonishing ways, like Polynesian Arabian Nights.”48
Upon his return to the United States in 1893, Adams published his story of Tahiti
as Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti. Perhaps “published” is the wrong word.
Adams, who possessed a self-consciousness at odds with his profound sense of superiority, was always leery about publishing work under his own name, so he had Memoirs of
Marau Taaroa privately printed, distributing copies to only to his closest friends. Naturally,
he presented one to La Farge, and he gave another to John Hay, who had encouraged the
project.49
45 Fiona J. Mackintosh, “The Revitalization of Henry Adams,” American History 38, no. 3 (August 2003): 73.
46 Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, February 6, 1891, in Letters, 3:402; Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), 2:832.
47 Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky, expanded edition (University of
California Press, 1981), 111.
48 Quoted in Mabel La Farge, “A Niece’s Memories,” Yale Review 9, no. 2 (January 1920): 276.
49 Luther S. Livingston, American Book Prices Current (Dodd and Livingston, 1911), 452; The Life and Works of
John Hay, 1838-1905: A Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition Shown at the John Hay Library of Brown Univer-

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Adams also sent a copy to Marau Taaroa. This gift indicates that Adams saw the
Memoirs of Marau Taaroa as an interim text. He hoped to get feedback from her before
expanding the work into its final form. Marau Taaroa thoroughly annotated and corrected
Adams’s text and sent the volume back to him. While living in Paris, Adams began revising
the work once he received her marked-up copy. Zukofsky saw the revision as a labor of
love. Rewriting the work in Paris, Adams lingered over his memories of Tahiti.50
The revised version appeared in Paris in 1901 as the Memoirs of Arii Taimai. Again
Adams had it privately printed, but he did distribute this version a little more widely than
the Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, sending copies to several New England libraries. Marau Taaroa’s family helped distribute the Memoirs of Arii Taimai more widely, donating one copy
to the Polynesian Society in New Zealand and another to Cambridge University Library.51
In terms of its narrative point of view, Memoirs of Arii Taimai is practically postmodern. Though purportedly a historical work, Adams wrote it in the voice of Arii Taimai,
thus making it a fictionalized autobiography. Vanessa Smith characterizes the work as “a
piece of consummate ventriloquism.”52 In terms of genre and narrative voice, Memoirs of
Arii Taimai anticipates The Education of Henry Adams. Much as Adams created narrative
distance by writing in the voice of Arii Taimai in one work, he created narrative distance
in The Education of Henry Adams by telling his own story in the third person. In a way the
Memoirs of Arii Taimai gave Adams more narrative freedom than the later work, letting
him speak in a female voice to tell a story of female power.
Adams privately published The Education of Henry Adams in 1907. After his death
in 1918, his autobiography was released in a trade edition, became a surprise bestseller,
and earned recognition as a classic of the genre. Memoirs of Arii Taimai was practically
forgotten after Adams’s death. Not until a German translation appeared did the book begin receiving a broader readership. In 1923 Paul Hambruch, a German ethnologist who
had conducted field research in Micronesia and collected numerous fairy tales and myths
from the Pacific Islands, published his translation as part of a series of papers issued by
the Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg.53

sity in Honor of the Centennial of His Graduation at the Commencement of 1858 (Brown University Library, 1961),
42-43; John Hay to Henry Adams, December 30, 1890, in William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay
(Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 2:86.
50 Zukofsky, Prepositions, 111.
51 Library of Congress Acquisitions: Rare Book and Special Collections Division, 1980 (Library of Congress, 1982),
28-29; The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress
Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries (Mansell, 1968-1981), no. A0060914; “Transactions
and Proceedings,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 13, no. 2 (June 1904): 132; Report of the Library Syndicate for
the Year Ending December 31, 1902 (Cambridge University Press, 1903), 22.
52 Vanessa Smith, “Henry Adams / Ari’i Taimai: ‘That Link of History,’” in Exploration and Exchange: A South
Seas Anthology, 1680-1900, ed. Jonathan Lamb, et al. (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 318.
53 Henry Adams, Denkwürdigkeiten von Arii Taimai e Marama von Eimeo, Teriirere von Tooarai, Teriinui von Tahiti,
Tauratua i amo, translated by Paul Hambruch (O. Meissner, 1923).

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Four more decades would pass before another European edition. In 1964 a French
version translated by Suzanne and André Lebois appeared as one of the publications of
the Society of Oceanists. Along with Hambruch’s German translation, the French version
added scholarly oomph to the Memoirs of Arii Taimai, establishing the work as a contribution to ethnology, anthropology, and folklore studies. Reviewing the Lebois translation, the
editor of Oceania made no bones about its significance: “All students of Tahitian ethnography need to read this book.”54
After World War II American literary scholars began to notice the Memoirs of
Arii Taimai, which earned a complimentary mention in the standard history of American literature. Under the general editorship of Robert E. Spiller, the Literary History of the
United States appeared in 1948. Spiller had the scholarly ability and leadership skills to
bring this massive project to completion. In a personal tribute, Louis D. Rubin reminisced,
“It was Bob Spiller who showed me that a man could be a warm, generous, understanding
human being and also be a professor of English.”55
Spiller became so strongly associated with the project that the Literary History of
the United States is generally known by his last name. Spiller gave Henry Adams his own
chapter: a testament to the literary status he held at the time. Spiller wrote the Adams
chapter himself. He devoted one paragraph to the Memoirs of Arii Taimai but, strangely,
never named the book by title.56
The omission may reflect Spiller’s dislike of the hard-to-pronounce title. To be
sure, Adams lacked Melville’s ability to craft mysterious, yet memorable titles like Typee
or Omoo. Melville was quite proud of the title of his first book, which he called “the magic,
cabalistic tabooistic Typee.” Omoo, the title of his second book, is similarly evocative.57
Spiller’s reluctance to name the Memoirs of Arii Taimai in the Literary History of the
United States should not be taken as a sign of his disapproval. He may have disliked the title, but he quite enjoyed the book. The year before the Literary History of the United States,
in fact, Spiller had edited the Memoirs of Arii Taimai, but he did retitle the book. The title
page of his edition calls it Tahiti. In the introduction Spiller explains his change of title,
noting that since “Tahiti” is the spine title of the 1901 Paris edition, he could justify using
that title for his scholarly edition.58 Spiller’s introduction to Tahiti is the single fullest criti-

54 Henry Adams, Mémoires d’Arii Taimai, translated by Suzanne Lebois and André Lebois (Musée de l’Homme,
1964); A. P. Elkin, “Publications de la Sociétés des Océanistes,” Oceania 39, no. 3 (March 1969): 251.
55 Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Spiller, of ‘Spiller et al.,’” American Quarterly 19, no. 2 (Summer 1967): 301.
56 Robert E. Spiller, Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller, et al. (Macmillan, 1948), 2:1088.
57 Herman Melville to John Murray, September 2, 1846, in Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Northwestern
University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 65; Kevin J. Hayes, Melville’s Folk Roots (Kent State University
Press, 1999), 79.
58 Robert E. Spiller, introduction to Henry Adams, Tahiti, ed. Robert E. Spiller (Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1947), vii.

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cal appreciation of Adams’s book published to that time. His edition did not immediately
inspire any further critical attention, however.
During the mid-sixties, Spiller’s edition had become nearly as scarce as the original. In 1968 Gregg Press published a facsimile of the Paris edition with an introduction by
Fred C. Sawyer. This edition is also titled Tahiti. In his introduction Sawyer identifies the
appeal of Arii Taimai and her clan: “For once, Adams could describe such a ritual of high
society without his usual ironic detachment: he was genuinely moved, for to be officially
received by a family which was aristocratic without being cold, formal, or supercilious was
an event which broke through the wall of reserve surrounding this sensitive, melancholy
man.”59
Spiller’s edition would be reprinted in 1976. Even before then, the Memoirs of
Arii Taimai began receiving some perceptive critical attention. Louis Auchincloss, who
wrote the Henry Adams volume for the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American
Writers in 1971, began it with Adams’s trip to the South Pacific. Auchincloss identified the
Memoirs of Arii Taimai as an important step in Adams’s career. The task of reconstructing
Arii Taimai’s family history and her traditional legends required Adams to use both his
abilities as a historian and as a literary artist to bring alive the world of Tahiti’s ancestral
past.60
Though the publication of Adams’s letters in the 1980s hurt his reputation as a historian, a strange thing happened at the end of the twentieth century: Adams began receiving renewed scholarly attention, and it was mainly because of the Memoirs of Arii Taimai.
It turns out that a new generation of literary scholars found appealing the political issues
and power struggles that Adams treats in the book and the narrative point of view that he
takes. In 1999 Daniel L. Manheim contributed a lengthy article about the theme of empire
in the Memoirs of Arii Taimai to Biography, a scholarly journal published at the University
of Hawai‘i.61
Several more scholarly treatments followed. In the year 2000 the University of
Chicago Press published Exploration and Exchange, an anthology of South Seas literature
that included an excerpt from the Memoirs of Arii Taimai. In her introduction to the excerpt, Vanessa Smith observes that the Memoirs gave Adams “the opportunity to play oral
ethnographic informant; the liberal republican to comment on kingship; the white male
historian to dress up as a Tahitian queen and write a history motivated by female power.”62

59 Roger G. Rose, “Tahiti, Memoirs of Arii Taimai,” American Neptune 29, no. 2 (April 1969): 148-149; Fred C.
Sawyer, introduction to Henry Adams, Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai (Gregg Press, 1968), v.
60 Louis Auchincloss, Henry Adams (University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 6-8.
61 Daniel L. Manheim, “The Voice of Arii Taimai: Henry Adams and the Challenge of Empire,” Biography 22,
no. 2 (Spring 1999): 209-231.
62 Smith, “Henry Adams / Ari’i Taimai,” 318.

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Writing “The Revitalization of Henry Adams,” a 2003 piece for American History,
Fiona J. Mackintosh identified Adams’s trip to Tahiti as the event that allowed him to revitalize himself after the death of his wife and the exhaustive work that writing the history
of the Jefferson and Madison administrations required. Mackintosh’s title may be a double
entendre: it also suits the story of Adams’s critical reputation. The renewed attention to
the Memoirs of Arii Taimai over the past quarter century has revitalized Adams’s literary
reputation.63
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ronald E. Martin, a professor at the University of Delaware, showed little interest in Henry Adams, much preferring to direct his
attention to William Faulkner, but in his 2005 book, The Languages of Difference: American Writers and Anthropologists Reconfigure the Primitive, Martin analyzes the portrayal
of the primitive in American literature and culture, devoting a twenty-five-page chapter
to the Memoirs of Arii Taimai titled “The Historian’s Art as Ethnography.” And in 2007 Edward L. Galligan contributed a fine critical appreciation of the Memoirs of Arii Taimai to
the Sewanee Review: an indication that even the South was finally willing to listen to what
Adams had to say.64
The questions that Henry Adams raises in the Memoirs of Arii Taimai regarding colonial empire, the gendered structure of power, and the importance of the female voice
to history all make its author worth a new look. I still find it difficult to forgive him for his
unprincipled attack on Captain John Smith, and we all must admit that Adams’s book is no
Omoo. But the Memoirs of Arii Taimai is significant enough to recognize it as a vital part of
Adams’s literary life and a notable contribution to American literary history. In addition to
“The Dynamo and the Virgin,” perhaps the next edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature will contain a selection of the Memoirs of Arii Taimai.

63 Mackintosh, “Revitalization of Henry Adams,” 70.
64 Ronald E. Martin, The Languages of Difference: American Writers and Anthropologists Reconfigure the Primitive, 1878-1940 (University of Delaware Press, 2005), 66-90; Edward L. Galligan, “Henry Adams’s Tahiti,” Sewanee
Review 115, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 455-462.

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Works Cited
Adams, Henry, “Captain John Smith,” North American Review 104, January 1867.
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Meissner, 1923.
Adams, Henry, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Earl N. Harbert, New York, Library of America, 1986.
Adams, Henry, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James
Madison, ed. Earl N. Harbert, New York, Library of America, 1986.
Adams, Henry, Mémoires d’Arii Taimai, translated by Suzanne Lebois and André Lebois
(Musée de l’Homme, 1964).
Adams, Henry, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N.
Samuels, New York, Library of America, 1983.
Adams, Henry, “The Education of Henry Adams,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Ronald Gottesman, et al., New York, Norton, 1979, Vol. 2.
Adams, Henry, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature,
ed. Robert S. Levine, et al., 10th edition, New York, Norton, 2022, Vol. 3.
Adams, Henry, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson, et al., Cambridge, Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1982, Vol. 1-3.
Auchincloss, Louis, Henry Adams, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, Paris, Gallimard, 1931.
Contosta, David R., “Adams, Henry,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty
and Mark C. Carnes, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, Vol. 1.
Cowley, Malcolm, “American Pléiade,” New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1982.
Elkin, A. P., “Publications de la Sociétés des Océanistes,” Oceania 39, no. 3, March 1969.
Galligan, Edward L., “Henry Adams’s Tahiti,” Sewanee Review 115, no. 3, Summer 2007.
Hayes, Kevin J., Melville’s Folk Roots, Kent, Kent State University Press, 1999.
James, Henry, and Henry Adams, The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams,
1877-1914, ed. George Monteiro, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
La Farge, Mabel, “A Niece’s Memories,” Yale Review 9, no. 2, January 1920.
Lemay, J. A. Leo, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith?, Athens, University of Georgia
Press, 1992.
Lewis, R. W. B., “The Literary Americans,” New Republic, May 19, 1982.
Leyda, Jay, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, New York,
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969, Vol. 2.
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August 2003.
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Manheim, Daniel L., “The Voice of Arii Taimai: Henry Adams and the Challenge of Empire,”
Biography 22, no. 2, Spring 1999.
Martin, Ronald E., The Languages of Difference: American Writers and Anthropologists Reconfigure the Primitive, 1878-1940, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Melville, Herman, Correspondence: The Writings of Herman Melville, Vol. 14, ed. Lynn Horth, Evanston and Chicago, Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993.
Melville, Herman, Typee, A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo, A Narrative of Adventures in the
South Seas; Mardi and a Voyage Thither, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle, New York, Library
of America, 1982.
Podhoretz, Norman, “Henry Adams: The ‘Powerless’ Intellectual in America,” New Criterion, June 1983.
Poe, Edgar Allan, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson, New York, Library of America,
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Abstract
Starting with a general overview of Henry Adams’s works, this history of the Memoirs of Arii Taimai will also examine Adams’s overall critical reception.
Since the Memoirs of Arii Taimai was privately printed, it received little attention
initially. For his other works, Adams earned a reputation as a major American author.
Adams’s reputation peaked in the early 1980s, but with the release of his collected letters,
readers began to question his motives.
His letters reveal that his critical essay on Captain John Smith, for example, was
motivated by narrow-minded sectional prejudice. Adams’s reputation diminished considerably after his letters appeared. In recent years, however, his reputation has revived,
largely because of renewed attention to the Memoirs of Arii Taimai.
Kevin J. Hayes, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, now lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several books on American
history, literature and culture including George Washington: A Life in Books (Oxford
University Press), for which he received the George Washington Prize. He is currently writing an intellectual life of Henry Adams’s great grandfather John Adams.

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Résumé
« La réception critique de Henry Adams »
En prenant pour point de départ un aperçu général des œuvres de Henry Adams,
cette contribution retrace l’histoire des Mémoires de Arii Taimai et examine également la
réception critique globale de l’historien américain.
Publié à titre privé, l’ouvrage Mémoires de Arii Taimai a suscité peu d’attention lors
de sa parution. Par contre, ses autres œuvres ont permis à Adams d’acquérir une réputation d’auteur américain majeur, réputation qui atteint son apogée au début des années 1980, même si la publication de ses lettres a suscité chez les lecteurs des interrogations par rapport à ses motivations.
Ses lettres révèlent par exemple que son essai critique sur le capitaine John Smith
était motivé par des préjugés qui témoignent d’une certaine étroitesse d’esprit, ce qui entachera considérablement sa réputation après leur publication. Sa renommée auprès des
lecteurs s’est cependant ravivée, en grande partie grâce à l’attention renouvelée portée
aux Mémoires de Arii Taimai.
Kevin J. Hayes, professeur émérite d’anglais à l’Université de Central Oklahoma,
réside actuellement à Toledo, dans l’Ohio. Il est l’auteur de plusieurs livres sur l’histoire,
la littérature et la culture américaines, dont George Washington: A Life in Books (Oxford
University Press), pour lequel il a reçu le prix George Washington. Il travaille actuellement sur l’histoire de la vie intellectuelle de l’arrière-grand-père de Henry Adams, John
Adams, deuxième président des États-Unis.

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