LAUSR

The spine and title page of the 1918 Houghton Mifflin first edition of The Education of Henry Adams bear the unauthorized subtitle An Autobiography. Worthington Chauncey Ford, historian and archivist, proposed this intervention in a letter to the volume’s nominal editor, Henry Cabot Lodge, five weeks after Adams’s death. As a moment in the evolution of private manuscript to published book, there is nothing exceptional about this two-word intrusion. Editors commonly modify titles to identify texts with marketable genres: such niche placement was certainly the case here, the more so given Adams’s zealously guarded private life—a life that, in addition to its dynastic associations, cast long shadows of tragedy and scandal. An Autobiography may or may not explain the brisk sales and subsequent nod of the Pulitzer jury that selected The Education as that year’s nonfiction prizewinner. But the phrase surely obviated confusion associated with the title’s enigmatic central term, “education,” while it served to suppress Adams’s own proposed subtitle: “A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.” The action undertaken by Ford and Lodge presumably found favor at Houghton Mifflin. It no doubt made the volume approachable to readers more interested in persons than ideas. Only with Ernest Samuels’ 1973 Riverside edition was “An Autobiography” purged from the title. For recipients of the privately circulated 1907 printing, as well as for careful readers of the posthumous edition, however, it had been clear that Adams strategically substituted “education” for “autobiography,” and that this substitution has genre-defining consequences. As a critical event in the theory and practice of life narrative, The Education of Henry Adams articulates the close association of learning and lived experience, a commonplace of autobiographical texts, while codifying “education” as a metonym of “the life” for many a practitioner to follow. The proliferation, after Adams, of life narratives entitled The Education of ... testifies to his success in making the terms practically interchangeable. The formula has been used in biographies and memoirs of everyone from Ronald Reagan to Richard Rodriguez, from Sonny Carson to David Petraeus, from “Little Tree” to Bill Belichick. It would doubtless have intrigued, if also mortified, Adams to