Character Sketches

In James Traub’s biography of John Quincy Adams, “character sketches” names a self-imposed exercise from Adams’ college years: as a Harvard student he set himself the task of producing written portraits of all forty-six of his classmates, in alphabetical order over a period of months, listing each one’s birth date and home. The biography frames this as a window into Adams’ temperament — he “deeply admired several of his classmates, liked most, and despised a few,” and “few of them escaped unscathed from Adams’ harsh judgment.” Kyle tags the passage with Be Observant, reading the sketches as an early instance of disciplined, exacting observation of people.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — the young Adams’ months-long project of writing character sketches of all forty-six Harvard classmates; cited as an example of his observant, judgmental cast of mind (tagged Be Observant).