Volume 42, Number 12 · July 13, 1995
Bad Man from Olympus
By Thomas C. Grey
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self
by G. Edward White
Oxford University Press, 628 pp., $37.50
The Collected Works of Justice Holmes: Complete Public Writings and Selected Judicial Opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes
edited by Sheldon M. Novick
University of Chicago Press, three volumes: 1398 pp., $175.00
The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
edited and with an introduction by Richard A. Posner
University of Chicago Press, 342 pp., $24.95
As a child, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), heard his grandmother tell of seeing British troops leave Boston during the Revolution, and today men who were his law clerks are still alive. The son of one of the most famous American writers, he grew up reading Emerson's essays right off the press and late in life commented on T.S. Eliot, Proust, and Hemingway. In his twenties he fought in the Civil War, in his thirties he wrote perhaps the most important American book on law, in his sixties he was chief justice of Massachusetts, and he served on the United States Supreme Court into the Great Depression.
Review, 4465 words
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