Abstract

An American Dynasty

The article critically appraises the book "The Adams Family," by James Truslow Adams. Adams's study is a much feebler piece of writing than his well-known ventures into New England history. It has an air of improvisation, there is no sign of hard spade-work in it. Thus what he has to say of the dynasty differs but little from what anyone else would say--that its members, from first to last, have always taken life with deadly seriousness; that they have had a vast appetite for learning, some of it sound and some of it otherwise; that they have had the comfort of an unshakable self-righteousness; that they have commonly done well in a worldly sense; that they have always been more or less snobbish; and that every one of them has been a helpless victim to cacoethes scribendi.