As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's education form 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion, and the growth of the United States as world power.