Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian - Hardcover

Richard Aldous

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393244709 ISBN 13: 9780393244700

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

Synopsis

"The triumph of Richard Aldous's new book is that it separates the myth from the reality, explaining both the seemingly inexorable rise of Schlesinger and how he contributed so much to the subsequent mythologising of the Kennedy era." The Irish Times Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917 2007), known today as the architect of John F. Kennedy's presidential legacy and the myth of Camelot blazed an extraordinary path from Harvard University to war-time London to the West Wing. The son of a pioneering historian and a two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner in his own right Schlesinger redefined the art of presidential biography. A Thousand Days, his best-selling record of the Kennedy administration, remains immensely influential and has cemented Schlesinger's place as one of the nation's greatest political image makers. In this vivid account of Schlesinger's life and career, biographer Richard Aldous draws on oral history, rarely seen archival documents and the official Schlesinger papers to craft an invaluable portrait of a brilliant and controversial historian who framed America's rise to global empire. Schlesinger promises to transform our understanding of one of the key figures of the twentieth-century American intellectual elite

About this title

Review:

"The extent to which Schlesinger's father pulled strings for his son is one of the most intriguing revelations of Richard Aldous's new book. I generally find biographies of biographers by biographers a bore, but this is an exception." --Niall Ferguson, The Sunday Times

"What makes Aldous's book of more than incidental interest during the Trump years... is the perspective it provides on the current travails of American liberalism." --London Review of Books

"Richard Aldous's absorbing biography will surely be the definitive account of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr." --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Richard Aldous is a professor of history at Bard College, where he holds the Eugene Meyer Chair. He is the author and editor of eleven books, including The Lion and the Unicorn and Reagan and Thatcher. Aldous is a contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic, and his writing appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, and the American Interest, where he is a contributing editor. He lives in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0393244709
• ISBN 13: 9780393244700
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 496