title: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Penguin Classics)
author: Henry Adams
description: Born in 1838 into one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Boston, a family which had produced two American presidents, <b>Henry Adams</b> had the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning both in the world of practical men and afffairs (as a journalist and an assistant to his father, who was an American diplomat in Washinton and London), and in the world of ideas (as a prolific writer, the editor of the prestigious <b>North American Review</b>, and a professor of medieval, european, and American history at Harvard), Adams was one of the few men of his era who attempted to understand art, thought, culture, and history as one complex force field of interacting energies. His two masterworks in this dazzling effort are <b>Mont Saint Michel and Chartres</b> and <b>The Education of Henry Adams</b>, published one after the other in 1904 and 1907. Taken together they may be read as Adams' spiritual autobiography&mdash;two monumental volumes in which he attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature in order to attempt to understand the individual's place in history and society. They constitute one of the greatest historical and philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature.<br><br><b>Raymond Carney</b> is well known for his writing on the relationships between American art, thought, and culture. He has been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, served as an artistic consultant to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and written extensively on American and British poetry, ficiton, drama, dance, painting, and film. His two most recent books are <b>American Dreaming</b> (University of California Press) and <b>Figures of Desire</b> (Cambridge University Press). He teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.
zlib_text: PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF THE
  AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS
  Mont'Saint'Michel and Chartres
  
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  Charires: The Tree of Jesse Window
  {Upper fart)
  
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  Mont-Saint-Michel
  and Chartres
  BY
  HENRY ADAMS
  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  RALPH ADAMS CRAM
  Illustrated
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  fCfie SMtaetjJibe ^tt$i Cambribge
  1913
  'v
  
  COPYRIGHT,
  1904, BY HENRY ADAMS
  '
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
  Published November igi3
  957249
  
  Editor's Note
  FROM the moment when, through the courtesy of my friend Barrett
  Wendell,
  I came first to know Mr. Henry Adams's book, MonU
  Saint-Michel and
  Chartres,
  I was profoundly convinced
  that
  this
  privately
  printed, jealously guarded volume
  should
  be withdrawn
  from
  its hiding-place amongst the bibliographical treasures of
  col-
  lectors and amateurs and given that wide publicity demanded alike
  by its intrinsic nature and the causfe it could so admirably serve.
  To say that the book was a revelation is inadequately to express
  a fact; at once all the theol