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He was born 150 years ago today, during the Ulysses S. Grant administration, and he died the year NASA was established.
Samuel Hopkins Adams’s millions of words must have reached just about every American during his life, whether through his muckraking journalism, short stories, romance novels, movies, poetry, histories, or biographies. He was a one-man Ford factory for the written word in every form it could take for the majority of his long life. But after he died, Adams’s legacy of documenting America’s evolving zeitgeist was relegated to archives and dusty libraries.
Adams’s broad career hasn’t garnered the same lasting attention of some of his contemporaries like William Faulkner, Ida Tarbell, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. He called his own writing “competent,” and others scarcely disagreed. But his mountain of work reveals in relief the humor and gravity of a modern society taking shape in the 20th century: principled antagonism to corporate corruption, sex