Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
The Adventures of Arthur
By Joseph Lelyveld
Journals, 1952–2000
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger
Penguin, 894 pp., $40.00
The first volume of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s memoirs, A Life in the Twentieth Century,[1] didn't exactly race through his early years. When it ended at the century's midpoint on page 523, its hero was thirty-three. The justification for all those pages was in the good-humored and reflective telling, his passion for witnessing history as well as writing it, and its unusually large cast of characters. The young historian may not have known everyone who counted politically and intellectually in New York, London, and Washington but he was well on his way. Those he didn't know firsthand, he heard about secondhand, and, across all the years, he'd retained stories and snatches of conversation that told a bigger story than that of his own impressive rise. Somewhat diffidently, in the preface to the memoir, he admitted to drawing on diaries and notes he had kept 'intermittently' over the years but chided himself for not keeping them 'more faithfully.' Now it turns out that they amounted to more than six thousand typed pages.
Review, 4336 words
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