Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes The Shaping Years 1841-1870

Author: Mark DeWolfe Howe
Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957
Condition: Hardcover, Very Good, Minor scuffs on book exterior, Minor loose binding on book interior

Distinguished biographies of great men are not common, but it is seldom indeed that the pairing of biographer and subject is so natural and fortunate as in the case of Mark DeWolfe Howe and that giant of nine decades of American life, Justice Holmes. A lawyer whose early career included a year as secretary to Holmes, Mark Howe comes from the New England world that produced Holmes and he inherits a similar tradition of creative probing, pragmatic curiosity.

During a period of contradictory stuffiness and brilliance in Boston and through the splintering and passion of the Civil War, the young Holmes tested his beliefs and his strength against the world he found. Belief as a consequence became “that upon which a man is willing to act.” As a soldier on the edge of death, he proved to himself that he could face extinction with the grace and fortitude of those who had the support of a religion he had discarded. There was the dignity as well as the danger of arrogance in this aristocracy of doubt, but also, as Howe points out, “No discovery, in youth or maturity, had larger moment than that.”

Howe’s biography is of the stature of Holmes himself. Readers of this book will become participants in the making of greatness.