The diary of John Quincy Adams is one of the most extraordinary works in American literature. Begun in 1779 at the age of twelve, kept more or less faithfully until his death almost 70 years later, and totaling some fifteen thousand closely-written manuscript pages, it is an unrivaled record of historical events and personalities from the nation’s founding to the antebellum era. It is also a masterpiece of American prose, tracing the spiritual, literary, and scientific interests of an exceptionally lively mind. Now, for the 250th anniversary of Adams’s birth, Library of America and historian David Waldstreicher have prepared a two-volume reader’s edition, presenting selections based for the first time on the original manuscripts, restoring personal and revealing passages suppressed in earlier editions.

The edition begins with Adams’s very first diary entries, written during the America Revolution, as he prepares to embark on a perilous wartime voyage to Europe with his father, diplomat John Adams, and records his early impressions of Franklin and Jefferson and of Paris in the waning days of the ancien régime. It details his eventful years of study at Harvard and as a law clerk, amid the controversy over the ratification of the new federal Constitution, and his emergence into the world of politics: as American minister to the Netherlands and to Prussia in the 1790s, and then as a stubbornly independent U.S. senator from Massachusetts during the Jefferson administration. And it reveals a young man at war with his passions before finding love with the remarkable Louisa Catherine Johnson.

In scenes evocative of War and Peace, the diary follows the young married couple to St. Petersburg, where as U.S. minister Adams is a witness to Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia. Its account of the negotiations to end the War of 1812 at Ghent, where Adams leads the American delegation, may be the most detailed and dramatic picture of a diplomatic confrontation ever recorded. From Ghent, Adams moves to Paris, where he observes the tumult of Napoleon’s brief return to power and final fall in June 1815.

As Volume 1 concludes, Adams, now secretary of state under James Monroe, takes the fore in a fractious cabinet and emerges as the principal architect of the Monroe Doctrine, one of the most consequential geopolitical statements in history. The diary achieves possibly its greatest force in its prescient foreshadowing of the Civil War and Emancipation, a collective “object,” as Adams describes it during the Missouri Crisis of 1820, “vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue.”

A companion Library of America volume presents diary selections from 1821 to 1848.

Watch a trailer (1:48)

David Waldstreicher, editor, is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997). As editor, his books include A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams (2013).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Achelis and Bodman Foundation and by Sidney & Ruth Lapidus.

John Quincy Adams: Diaries 1779–1821 is kept in print by a gift from Emme Levin Deland and Candace Wainwright to the Guardians of American Letters Fund made in honor of Phyllis Lee Levin.