Product Description

From America's most celebrated living historian comes this "sprightly, straightforward account of the first third of an active and charmed life" (New York Times). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. turns a studied eye on a personal past and reconstructs the history that has made him such an iconic figure for generations of readers. A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY offers rare and revealing access to both the private world of a great American writer and the fine-grained texture of the American century. Ranging from a fondly remembered childhood in the Midwest to a fascinating, storied academic and political life, this volume is an important addition to Schlesinger's body of work, "every bit as well written as anything Schlesinger has done" (Providence Sunday Journal) and "sure to be used by students of the times for years to come" (Boston Globe). "With style and humor and a master historian's deft blending of personal detail with epic events" (Wall Street Journal), Schlesinger evokes the struggles, the questions, the paradoxes, and the triumphs that shaped our era as only he can do.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #813750 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Schlesinger's memoir covers the first 33 years of a life spent as a public thinker and historian. Born into a world of intellectual privilege, Schlesinger was exposed from his earliest years to literature and, through his father's work as a historian, to scholarship. The author recounts how his education at an elite prep school, a year-long trip around the world, and then at Harvard and Cambridge. Drawn to American history, Schlesinger wrote on Orestes Brownson and Andrew Jackson, and spent his war years as a political analyst for the OSS. Scattered through the chronology are ruminations on fads in historical interpretation, movies as the American art form, the pleasures of the martini and many other side points of interest and charm. Schlesinger recounts his interactions with an impressive array of personalities eminent in politics, academia and society; the scores of character sketches he furnishes are, in nearly all instances, sympathetic and affectionate. For Schlesinger, his personal experience, like American history, has been marked by, as Joyce said in Finnegan's Wake, a "commodius vicus of recirculation." He explains how people he met early in his career turn up again in a later era, just as a school of historical interpretation will fall out of favor only to be rediscovered by the next generation of historians. Schlesinger's personal and intellectual life validates his theory of circularity, except in one key respect: the author started as an anticommunist, liberal New Dealer, and he has adhered to these convictions ever since. The engaging and sophisticated volume explains how these principles were acquired and why they continue to command Schlesinger's assent. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Esteemed historian Schlesinger evokes the past (his own as well as the country's) in this splendidly written first volume of his memoirs. He covers the years he was shaped and molded--important years in U.S. history, for he was born the year the U.S. entered World War I, and he ends this volume in the post-World War II cold-war era. Schlesinger's foreword is a beautiful little contemplation of age, memory, and a historian's "professional obligation to supplement and rectify memory by recourse to documents." He sprang from a liberal midwestern background. His father was a noted historian himself, and the tenor of his family life growing up and the settings in which his functional family operated are brought to life with supple prose and compelling observations of what was going on around him in the world. He devotes whole chapters to the books he enjoyed growing up, his schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy, his world travels as a teenager, and his experiences as a student at Harvard. Schlesinger began his career as a historian as the country slid into war; his bad eyesight kept him from being drafted, and he got involved in civilian government work in Washington. Marriage worked itself into his busy life as well, and at war's end, he returned to his historical research and writing, and the liberal politics of the cold-war era certainly drew his interest. A major book for readers of history and current events. Brad Hooper
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About the Author
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the author of sixteen books, is a renowned historian and social critic. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1946 for The Age of Jackson and in 1966 for A Thousand Days. He is also the winner of the National Book Award for both A Thousand Days and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1979). In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York City.