The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Influential historian and ardent liberal Democrat, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote about 35,000 letters in his lifetime. Seemingly a representative selection, this gleaning from that trove reveals his circle of correspondents, which included intellectuals, Democratic Party politicians, and journalists. Reading Schlesinger’s missives, one can follow political events from the 1950s through the 1970s  from his perspective. If preserving and advancing the New Deal was Schlesinger’s primary public concern, associating himself with Democratic Party presidential candidates was his means; his effusive political advice to Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, and Bill Clinton abounds in these pages. Most of Schlesinger’s recipients, not as recognizable today, require brief footnotes that the editors provide. Schlesinger also wrote to his family, personal friends, and scholars who sought his viewpoint on the history he had witnessed. In an epistolary style that was newsy and gossipy, generous and caustic, this volume (combined with Journals, 1952–2000, 2007) displays the private side of theSchlesinger that the history-reading public knows from his works on Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, which remain landmarks on their subjects. A must for the American history collection. --Gilbert Taylor