The story of how the historian in Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was eclipsed by the courtier, the man of intellect by the scholar of the beau monde, has been told before, but never in such richness of detail as Richard Aldous tells it in his first-rate biography, or so pointedly as a parable of the decline of the mid-20th-century clerisy.
Schlesinger was born in 1917 in Columbus, Ohio, but his family moved to Massachusetts in 1924, when he was a child: His father, Arthur Sr., had been summoned to a professorship at Harvard. Young Arthur covered himself with glory at Exeter, Harvard College, and Peterhouse in Cambridge; in 1939 he returned to Harvard to take up a junior fellowship in the Society of Fellows, where he began work on The Age of Jackson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946.
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