Throughout his adult life, Henry Adams was always writing a book, so it is quite probable that his private publication of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres in 1905 is one way to date the beginnings of his next book-length project, The Education of Henry Adams, privately published in 1907. Of course, the precise “origins” of Adams's Education are far more difficult to determine, as they usually are for works of comparable influence and complexity. In his biography of Adams, Ernest Samuels “dates” Adams's first plans for The Education in a variety of ways, including “the anniversary of Henry's wedding day in June 1904,” with its reminder of his wife, Marian's, suicide in 1885, and Adams's reading of his friend Henry James's William Wetmore Story and His Friends (published in 1903), with its evocation of their New England generation and its fatal innocence of what history would bring. As he wrote James on November 18, 1903: “So you have written not Story's life, but your own and mine, – pure autobiography, – the more keen for what is beneath, implied, intelligible only to me, and half a dozen other people still living.…”

Adams's mood of reminiscence, sometimes maudlin or excessively self-critical in the years 1903–1905, mixed with yet other, practical concerns Adams felt about putting the historical record in order regarding the significant lives of his powerful friends and relatives.