In addition, Adams was a minor novelist, an artful humorist, and an unsuccessful philosopher of history. He was, most consistently, an intellectual gamester who liked to play labyrinthine tricks upon posterity, with a cunning that has guaranteed his continuing appeal. He made of himself a puzzle, with books, letters, and essays as clues, and thereby defined a teasing quest that a legion of critics has been obliged to undertake.
Adams was born in 1838 in Boston, "distinctly branded," as he put it in The Education of Henry Adams, by being the great-grandson of John Adams, second president of a United States he had helped to found; the grandson of John Quincy Adams, sixth president, diplomat, major opponent of slavery, and minor Harvard rhetorician; and son of Charles Francis Adams, Massachusetts statesman and editor of ancestral papers. It was a wealthy, enveloping, and unsettling heritage, since the Adamses had combined political service, intellectual anxiety, and prickly vanity for several generations, all of which weighed heavily on "ten pounds of unconscious babyhood." He was educated at schools in Boston and at Harvard, by Unitarian services that led eventually to agnosticism, by summers at the family's country seat in Quincy, and by his father, to whom he became private secretary when Charles Francis Adams undertook between 1850 and 1858 an edition of the papers of John Adams.
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