Henry Adams, "The Autobiography of Henry Adams."
Henry Adams was one of those Bostonians bred in an atmosphere of transcendentalism, reform and abolitionism who were thoroughly disillusioned by the war and the postwar ascendency of corporations and political machines, industrialism, New York and Chicago. Adams's own cynicism started earlier and ran deeper than that of his contemporaries because of his family's own loss of influence and power. In his family, all political figures would be regarded as rivals who threatened the family's reputation and its hopes. And as the family's political prospects waned Henry's cynicism waxed. His years spent abroad, his diplomatic experience and his inability to find a vocation or place that contented him increased his bitterness.
Adams was a great historian, and his history of the United States during Jefferson and Madison administrations is a classic. But his more autobiographical writings are marred by his cynicism and narcissism. Adams's admirer and imitator Gore Vidal has picked up on this side of his personality. In Vidal's fictional and non-fictional accounts of politics, everything comes down to the cynical exercise of power. Vidal's views about politics and history may be provocative, but they are seldom reliable. Take Vidal entirely at his word about American history and you're sure to go wrong. One has to apply some of this skepticism to Adams's own autobiographical and fictional writings, dominated as they are by Henry Adams's own wounded pride.
Adams is an intriguing figure. He came to hate the victorious Republicans because he associated them with the fall of the older America in which his family had played such a great role. At the same time, he had no use for the claims of the secessionists to be the defenders or preservers of that older republic or to offer a positive alternative for the country's future.