"Education had ended in 1871, life was complete in 1890." With this gnomic statement from The Education of Henry Adams, Adams apparently dismissed from the record twenty years from the most interesting and active period of his life. Those two decades embraced the first great productive season of his literary genius and the most significant years in his emotional maturity. Opening on the highest note of expectation and closing with his desperate flight to the South Seas, Adam's time of fulfillment and inner growth is the suject of this book by Ernest Samuels, a sequel to the Young Henry Adams (1948) that was followed by the final volume in Samuel's trilogy, Henry Adams: The Major Phase (1964).

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