Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In this stylish distillation of the life of a towering American, Susan-Mary Grant wrestles brilliantly with the question of what Oliver Wendell Holmes's Civil War experience meant for his subsequent career as a jurist. Richly informed and elegant in argument, this is contextualised biography of a very high order. - Richard Carwardine, author of The Global Lincoln This is a superb biography of one of the most influential American jurists of all time. Consistently incisive, it demonstrates not only how Justice Holmes was affected by his jarring experience of battle during the Civil War but also how, subsequently, he sought to negotiate his country's equally painful transition to modernity. -Robert Cook, author of Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart Susan-Mary Grant expertly tracks Holmes from the battlefields of the Civil War to the legal minefields of the Progressive era, deftly navigating his complex positions on slavery, free speech, and other issues. Understanding Holmes, we better understand America's passageã into the twentieth century. -Paul Quigley, author of Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65