Henry Adams died in Washington, DC, on March 27, 1918, less than eight months before World War I ended. Two years earlier he had authorized a posthumous edition of The Education of Henry Adams, one hundred copies of which had been printed privately in 1907. As it happened, then, The Education was published on September 28, 1918, one day after President Woodrow Wilson opened the Fourth Liberty Loan campaign with a stirring speech to a crowd of five thousand at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. “At every turn … we gain a fresh consciousness of what we mean to accomplish,” Wilson asserted. The war must end with the “final triumph of justice and fair dealing,” and the League of Nations must be established as an integral part “of the peace settlement itself.” The next morning, the New York Times urged people, “Back the Right and Might of Wilson and Pershing with the Dollars of Democracy!” Six weeks later, on November 11, the armistice was signed in a railroad car in Compiène Forest. “By a kind of irony, just at the greatest moment in history,” the North American Review announced in its December 1918 review of The Education, “appears this prodigy of a book.”

Widely reviewed, The Education became a best-seller. For twenty-five years, Adams had been writing his friends bleak letters, predicting that the United States would follow Europe’s drift toward catastrophe. Early in 1914 Henry James responded to one such letter by describing it as a melancholy outpouring of “unmitigated blackness.”