Henry Adams and Samuel Clemens are often considered to represent the polar extremes of their age. Yet, however divergent their careers seem to be, it is absorbing to watch them approaching, each in his different way, a final mood of total despair that argues concurrence rather than coincidence. Personal tragedies might be adduced to explain this: the heart-breaking death of Susy Clemens and the long-drawn-out agony of Livy, the suicide of Adams's wife Clover, even the humiliation of bankruptcy, which Clemens suffered personally and Adams witnessed in his family – these certainly are contributory causes. But as one examines the conspicuous modes of this despair – a compound of comminatory denunciation and brooding, intense pessimism – one is compelled to search further afield for the prime causes. Such an investigation reveals that this despair is in a slow process of incubation from their earliest work, and that it is finally hatched by the growing discords, conflicts, and problems of the age. It is not a despair of personal bereavement but of country – ultimately of man.

Much of Adams's despair, to say nothing of his wounded pride, is the negative residue of a constantly diminishing faith in American politics, which seemed progressively to abandon all the moral idealism that he felt that he and his family preeminently represented.