NP but an influence, Henry Adams

[Mark Kohut]

One overarching theme from The Education--part of Adams' 
quirky neurotic vision is his repeated refrain that, after whatever
he did in his life, and he was always a "success", 
he was totally unprepared for---America did not
prepare him---totally unable to know what to do next, as if
he should have a clear predictable path.....

This gave such prescient strength to his vision of change...it
was happening, had been since he was born, was as dynamic
as one image he made famous---the Dynamo. 


In another group, I am reading Wallace Stegner's "Angle of 
Repose", 1971 Pulitzer winner, which is told by a bright
historian about as old as the Century [Stegner born in 1899], who soliloquizes in the opening
chapter about the rapidity of change in his lifetime, naming the
key inventions, changes, technologies interestingly for fiction, reminding me
of Adams' motif when, in the next chapter, as the narrator reflects on 
one of his grandmothers, he remembers that she knew Henry
Adams, concretizing the theme.........................

1) Did Henry Adams' influence more writers back in the day--60s-- than 
lately? Hard to know but Stegner was also famous for teaching writing---
made Stanford the Iowa Writers' School West, teaching Stone, Kesey
and others--and I wonder if Oakley Hall of Warlock was another? 

2) Amateur oversimplified psychobiography 101:....learned lately
that the first (and only major?) trauma in young Henry's life was
his first day of school----having to leave his blissfully happy life
in paradise on his family's large natural acreage of land, streams,
animals, pure nature, a garden of Eden, in which he played like a young Adam....
He refused to go to school the second day, adamantly resisted every
effort he was so ....unprepared??...........for that first day.................
On the third day, his grandfather, retired President Adams had been summoned and 
he took Henry's hand and marched him uncompromisngly, inarguably, silently to school......................

Unprepared as lifelong relieved trauma....