Bushes, Roosevelts, Kennedys, Clintons: Where would any of them be without John Quincy Adams? That the son of a president could himself assume the presidency, as John Quincy did in 1825, was hardly self-evident in a nation that had only recently freed itself from monarchy. The election of John Quincy Adams proved that political dynasty was possible in the United States.

The fact that the Adams family produced just two presidents seems less notable if only because subsequent political dynasties have done the same. But from the perspective of John Quincy’s sons and grandsons the issue looked different. When 12-year-old Henry Adams first visited the White House in 1850, he felt as if he “owned” it. This wasn’t only because he had known his recently deceased president grandfather, or because the family gardener joked that young Henry expected to become president. It was also because his father, Charles Francis Adams, was the vice-presidential candidate on the Free Soil ticket in 1848. Henry had every reason to believe that his father would soon become the third Adams president, and he the fourth.

What he became instead was one of the great intellectuals of the Gilded Age, lauded for his elegant works of history, trenchant political critiques and essays bristling with aesthetic sophistication, none of which made him happy. “The Last American Aristocrat,” a marvelous new biography by David S. Brown, reveals how dynastic burden shaped the personality and career of the brilliant, bitter and thoroughly unlikable man who brought the prominence of the Adams family, and expectations for the endurance of political legacies, to an ignominious end. In the process it provides a compelling account of America’s transformation in the space of one man’s lifetime, from a Republic where the Adams name meant everything, to an industrialized behemoth that had left him behind.

[ Read an excerpt from “The Last American Aristocrat.” ]

Few Americans have entered life with more advantages than Henry Brooks Adams. He grew up in the rarefied atmosphere of Quincy, Mass., where the Adams family were as close to aristocrats as the Republic allowed. His intellectual prowess was apparent at an early age and he had the good luck to be born a third son. His adoring parents allowed him to follow his muse, even as two older brothers trod the expected path from Harvard College to law to positions of national leadership. Henry graduated from Harvard too, but then went to Europe, where he wrote fine essays about the chaotic political situation at the close of the 1850s and cultivated a cosmopolitanism that compounded an already distasteful superiority complex. His decision to become a writer was made possible by his millionaire maternal grandfather, who ensured that none of the Adams children would have to work for a living. To say that Henry Adams was born on third base and thought he hit a triple might be an understatement.

More than one-third of his Harvard class fought in the Civil War, but Henry skipped his generation’s crucible in favor of London high society at the side of his diplomat father, who was assigned to the post of minister to the Court of St. James’s by Abraham Lincoln. While Charles Francis worked tirelessly to maintain British neutrality, Henry cultivated patrician airs and wrote biting anonymous articles about British society and politics for The New York Times. Returning to the United States, he settled in Washington, D.C., rather than the Adams stronghold of Boston. By doing so he announced that his ambitions were national rather than regional in scope.